Digital Evolution Basics

For those who are not aware of digital evolution, I am writing a quick short summary. Digital evolution means evolution of computer programs who compete for limited resources such as CPU and memory. In short, it goes something like this:

- You define a universe, which is virtual memory (space) and CPU (time)
- You create energy (CPU cycles)
- You define an extremely limited instruction set for Virtual Machine (Physics). Instruction set being limited is important because you want to mimic physics, not chemistry or biology
- You seed randomly generated programs of varying length
- You start parallel execution the random programs
- Each instruction eats up energy and at random times you feed energy into universe
- At random times mis-execute program instructions
- Run it for a long time and Voila! finally self replication gets evolved from very simple instructions
- Then arms race gets started between programs and things get interesting

Some people argue that digital evolution is not merely an emulation of real thing but is indeed a real manifestation of evolution and I tend to believe the same.

To download the digital evolution simulator written by me in Python (called PyPond), head to: Download: Normal version or With graphics version (requires PyGame library)

Possibly related posts (automagically generated):

• Digital Evolution
• PyPond: A digital life simulator in Python
• Is Evolution Predictable?
• Should Life neccessarily be tangible?
• Two great resources on Evolution

This entry was posted on June 25th, 2009 and is filed under Biology, Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.