Digital organism

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. Digital organisms can be traced back to the game Darwin, developed in 1961 at Bell Labs, in which computer programs had to compete with each other by trying to stop others from executing . A similar implementation that followed this was the game Core War. In Core War, it turned out that one of the winning strategies was to replicate as fast as possible, which deprived the opponent of all computational resources. 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.

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Related concepts (3)

Digital organism

Tierra (computer simulation)

Tierra is a computer simulation developed by ecologist Thomas S. Ray in the early 1990s in which computer programs compete for time (central processing unit (CPU) time) and space (access to main memory). In this context, the computer programs in Tierra are considered to be evolvable and can mutate, self-replicate and recombine. Tierra's virtual machine is written in C. It operates on a custom instruction set designed to facilitate code changes and reordering, including features such as jump to template (as opposed to the relative or absolute jumps common to most instruction sets).

Evolutionary algorithm

In computational intelligence (CI), an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduction, mutation, recombination, and selection. Candidate solutions to the optimization problem play the role of individuals in a population, and the fitness function determines the quality of the solutions (see also loss function).