Alife centers around a Genetic Programming library, developed by Terry Franguiadakis in the summer of 1992. The GP library is a C++ implementation of John Koza's techniques described in his book, Genetic Programming.

Franguiadakis was originally interested in evolving images using the same technique developed by Karl Sims. A discussion of the technique can be found in Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics in the Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 91.

Franguiadakis developed an image evolver that worked well well on SGI machines and from the two dimensional images he moved on to doing three dimensional shapes, eventually using the same library to do behavioral experiments.