tarun
August 21st, 2005, 13:01 PM
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Digital organism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolution.
Digital organisms can be traced back to the game Core War, in which computer programs had to compete with each other and try to stop the opponent from executing. It turned out that one of the winning strategies was to replicate as fast as possible, which had the result that the opponent was deprived of all computational resources. However, programs in the Core War game did not mutate.
Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory took the idea from Core War one step further in his core world system. He introduced mutations, in the form of random changes in the instructions of the programs inhabiting the core world. However, Rasmussen did not observe the evolution of complex and stable programs. It turned out that the programming language in which core world programs were written was very brittle, and more often than not mutations would completely destroy the functionality of a program.
The first to solve the issue of program brittleness was Tom Ray with his Tierra system. Tierra was similar to core world. However, Ray made some key changes to the programming language such that mutations were much less likely to destroy a program. With these modifications, he observed for the first time computer programs that did indeed evolve in a meaningful and complex way.
Core War (or Core Wars, also Darwin) is a game consisting of battles between two or more assembly language programs occupying the same memory space in which the winner is the last one running.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_organism
Digital organism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolution.
Digital organisms can be traced back to the game Core War, in which computer programs had to compete with each other and try to stop the opponent from executing. It turned out that one of the winning strategies was to replicate as fast as possible, which had the result that the opponent was deprived of all computational resources. However, programs in the Core War game did not mutate.
Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory took the idea from Core War one step further in his core world system. He introduced mutations, in the form of random changes in the instructions of the programs inhabiting the core world. However, Rasmussen did not observe the evolution of complex and stable programs. It turned out that the programming language in which core world programs were written was very brittle, and more often than not mutations would completely destroy the functionality of a program.
The first to solve the issue of program brittleness was Tom Ray with his Tierra system. Tierra was similar to core world. However, Ray made some key changes to the programming language such that mutations were much less likely to destroy a program. With these modifications, he observed for the first time computer programs that did indeed evolve in a meaningful and complex way.
Core War (or Core Wars, also Darwin) is a game consisting of battles between two or more assembly language programs occupying the same memory space in which the winner is the last one running.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_organism