Much of ALife-related research can be assigned to three main categories:
Wet
---Hard---
Soft
- Wet: liquid systems (chemistry and physics on the benchtop).
- Prebiotic chemistry: generating the precursors of living systems
- Replication and evolution in a test tube
- Distinguishing internal and external environments: membrane physics
- Hard: physical systems
- Soft robotics,
- Biomimetic engineering and embodied intelligence
- Computing hardware
- Soft: simulation systems
- Automata
- Artificial chemistry
- Simulated environments
- Evolutionary computation