[extropy-chat] TESTING DARWIN - Digital Life

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

If you want to find alien life-forms, hold off on booking that trip to
the moons of Saturn. You may only need to catch a plane to East
Lansing, Michigan.
The aliens of East Lansing are not made of carbon and water. They have
no DNA. Billions of them are quietly colonizing a cluster of 200
computers in the basement of the Plant and Soil Sciences building at
Michigan State University. To peer into their world, however, you have
to walk a few blocks west on Wilson Road to the engineering department
and visit the Digital Evolution Laboratory. Here you'll find a crew of
computer scientists, biologists, and even a philosopher or two gazing
at computer monitors, watching the evolution of bizarre new
life-forms.
These are digital organisms-strings of commands-akin to computer
viruses. Each organism can produce tens of thousands of copies of
itself within a matter of minutes. Unlike computer viruses, however,
they are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way
DNA mutates. A software program called Avida allows researchers to
track the birth, life, and death of generation after generation of the
digital organisms by scanning columns of numbers that pour down a
computer screen like waterfalls.
http://www.carlzimmer.com/articles/2005/articles_2005_Avida.html