Reminds me of ParticleLife (for example [1]), which has much simpler, but more random rules. There also emerge lots of interesting organism, but I rarely see replicators.
I used this as inpiration and to learn about Unity ECS and made a 3D version with WebGL support [2]; native builds obviously have much better performance. But it is all CPU-only. Anyway. What I found very interesting is dynamically switching between 2d and 3d. Most organisms survive the dimensional increase or reduction and just reconfigure itself to a similar structure.
I used this as inpiration and to learn about Unity ECS and made a 3D version with WebGL support [2]; native builds obviously have much better performance. But it is all CPU-only. Anyway. What I found very interesting is dynamically switching between 2d and 3d. Most organisms survive the dimensional increase or reduction and just reconfigure itself to a similar structure.
[1] https://fnky.github.io/particle-life/ [2] https://particlelife-3d-unity-ecs.github.io/