not to sound negative but.....

even though i support A-life i think an artifical life ecosystem would technically be impossible due to the fact that we cant program the random-ness required for evolution, sure we can make things reproduce and have hybrids due to different parents, but in order for evolution to happen there has to be a problem with the genetic code, say part of the code gets messed up and the animal is born with an extra leg/eye/arm/tail/etc. you then would have a new animal if that animal continued the cycle with the extra parts, due to the fact that it is totally random scripting it would(even if you used llFrand) not be as rare/random as real life

if you prove me wrong then i'll change my veiws and try to figure it out, hope im not sounding negative

I think that "ecosystem" is rather a more broad concept than what you imply in your post, as is "Artificial Life".

Both of which can be done using current technology, with limited scope and realistic expectations. It depends on what you are trying to achieve.

What you mention in your post would take more processing power and resources than are commonly available, true, but an easy experiment that even *I* (I know next to nothing about AL or AI, I just followed the wiring diagrams) was able to do last year was to create a robot (and I use that term loosely) with 6 "neurons" that was able to "learn" to walk in a rudimentary way in about 20 cycles. Other experiments from the same group created "communities" of such robots that demonstrated clear emergent behavior.

The process of trying to study emergent behavior and model artificial life is a worthwhile one, and I fully encourage anybody with an interest to participate. It may sound impossible from the first shallow descriptions, but everything is impossible till it ain't, right?