  This paper presents Coralai, a framework for exploring diverse ecosystems of
Neural Cellular Automata (NCA). Organisms in Coralai utilize modular,
GPU-accelerated Taichi kernels to interact, enact environmental changes, and
evolve through local survival, merging, and mutation operations implemented
with HyperNEAT and PyTorch. We provide an exploratory experiment implementing
physics inspired by slime mold behavior showcasing the emergence of competition
between sessile and mobile organisms, cycles of resource depletion and
recovery, and symbiosis between diverse organisms. We conclude by outlining
future work to discover simulation parameters through measures of multi-scale
complexity and diversity. Code for Coralai is available at
https://github.com/aidanbx/coralai , video demos are available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8IZQY02-8 .
