Life Engine - Creating Artiﬁcial Life for Scientiﬁc and Entertainment Purposes Gon¸ calo M. Marques 1 , Ant´ onio Lorena 1 , Jo˜ ao Magalh˜ aes 1 , Tˆ ania Sousa 1 , S.A.L.M. Kooijman 2 , and Tiago Domingos 1 1 Environment and Energy Section, DEM, Instituto Superior T´ ecnico, Lisbon, Portugal {goncalo.marques,antonio.lorena,joao.magalhaes, tania.sousa,tdomingos}@ist.utl.pt 2 Department of Theoretical Biology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands bas.kooijman@falw.vu.nl Abstract. The Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory has become a fundamental tool in modeling the metabolic behaviour of organisms. Its capacity to describe the biological aspect of life alone justiﬁes its applica- bility in Artiﬁcial Life. Aware of this potential, the DEB research group in Instituto Superior T´ ecnico (IST) in Lisbon has joined the videogame company Biodroid Entertainment in the Life Engine project. This project aims to develop a library for scientiﬁc purposes but also to create a biol- ogy engine for videogames. From the scientiﬁc point-of-view, this library is intended to be the standard tool for DEB researchers and, at the same time, to popularize DEB theory in other scientiﬁc communities, such as the AL community. Keywords: Dynamic Energy Budget, Artiﬁcial Life. 1 Introduction Bedau [1] published a list of open problems in Artiﬁcial Life (AL) in which the simulation of a unicellular organism during its life cycle was included. It was argued that this should be done through a bottom-up simulation of the genetic and regulatory networks of the cell. From the interaction of these low- level entities, global properties and processes should emerge. The search for patterns that emerge from the interaction of multiple low-level entities, while having well known merits, may have caused not only AL but also, for some time, Biology to overlook the similarities and patterns that are common to all organisms. The aim of Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory [2, 3, 4] is to explain these patterns. DEB theory is a general mathematical theory at the organism level applicable to all taxonomic groups with implications at the sub- and supra- organism levels. Since DEB is a non-species speciﬁc theory, it can describe all types of organisms, from bacteria to trees, with the same theoretical framework. G. Kampis,I. Karsai, and E. Szathm´ary(Eds.): ECAL 2009, Part II, LNCS 5778, pp. 278–285, 2011. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011