At the MEDIOCRE Lab, we are concerned about ever-increasing complexity of Artificial Life projects. In trying to construct simple systems that have "life-like" qualities, computer scientists have created projects that are so complex that even the programmers can not predict or understand their behaviors. Therefore, we need the new discipline of Artificial Artificial Life, or the science of building simple systems that have "artificial life-like" qualities. These even simpler systems should be more amenable to analysis than ALife, and we hope that we will not just understand artificial life, but artificial life as it could be.
We direct interested readers to a seminal paper in the field: A Simple Model of the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution by Cosma Rohilla Shalizi and William A. Tozier published in JWAS.