Digital organism

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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. The study of digital organisms is closely related to the area of artificial life.

History

Digital organisms can be traced back to the game

. Programs in the Core War game were also able to mutate themselves and each other by overwriting instructions in the simulated "memory" in which the game took place. This allowed competing programs to embed damaging instructions in each other that caused errors (terminating the process that read it), "enslaved processes" (making an enemy program work for you), or even change strategies mid-game and heal themselves.

Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory took the idea from Core War one step further in his core world system by introducing a genetic algorithm that automatically wrote programs. 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 Thomas S. Ray with his Tierra system, which was similar to core world. 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.

Later,

In 1996, Andy Pargellis created a Tierra-like system called Amoeba that evolved self-replication from a randomly seeded initial condition. More recently REvoSim - a software package based around binary digital organisms - has allowed evolutionary simulations of large populations that can be run for geological timescales.^[5]

Physical form

See also

Related topics and overviews

• Artificial life
• Evolutionary computation
• Genetic algorithms
• Combinatorial optimization
• Cellular automaton

Specific programs

• List of digital organism simulators
• Evolution@Home
• Polyworld

References

Further reading

• O'Neill, Bill (2003-10-13). "Digital Evolution". PLOS Biology. 1 (1). Public Library of Science (PLoS): e18.
  PMID 14551915
  .
• Wilke, Claus O.; Adami, Christoph (2002). "The biology of digital organisms". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 17 (11). Elsevier BV: 528–532.
  doi:10.1016/s0169-5347(02)02612-5
  .
• Pargellis, A.N. (1996). "The spontaneous generation of digital "Life"". Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena. 91 (1–2). Elsevier: 86–96.
  ISSN 0167-2789
  .
• Misevic, Dusan; Ofria, Charles; Lenski, Richard E (2005-11-08). "Sexual reproduction reshapes the genetic architecture of digital organisms". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 273 (1585). The Royal Society: 457–464.
  PMID 16615213
  .