by mathew If you’ve ever engaged in debate with a creationist, you’ll know that they can be extremely slippery. One of their favorite tactics is to claim that evolution is “just a theory” because it cannot be scientifically demonstrated. (Of course, it’s not as if any of the stuff they believe can be scientifically demonstrated, […]
Mention computer simulations, and most people will think of SimCity. The Maxis computer game (now sold by Electronic Arts) became an instant classic, and has inspired many imitators. But there’s a less well known Maxis game called SimEarth, which simulates the emergence and evolution of life on Earth. You are […]
Imagine a grid of squares that stretch away in all directions. Imagine the grid is infinite–or at least, so large that you’ll never find the edge of it. Let’s pretend that each square can either contain life–be “alive”–or contain nothing and be “dead”. We’ll show the “dead” squares as empty white […]
Early computers were so expensive that it was unthinkable that you would have an entire computer to yourself. Instead, many people would use a single “timesharing” computer system. Unfortunately, early primitive operating systems lacked technologies like memory protection. If a program accidentally malfunctioned, it would sometimes end up crashing other programs, […]
After the unexpected success of Tierra, computer scientists began to explore whether similar techniques could be used to evolve real, useful code. Today, the state of the art is Genetic Programming or Evolutionary Programming, invented (and patented) in 1992 by John R. Koza of Stanford University. Like Tierra, the “DNA” of […]
World Of Dawkins: Information about the work of Richard Dawkins. Includes a list of available Biomorph software. Morph Lab: Explore Biomorphs right now, if you have a Java-capable web browser. King Of The Hill: A Core War web site. Core War Pages: Including the complete Core War resource list. The Tierra Home Page: Tom Ray’s […]
In 1968 a biologist named Aristid Lindenmeyer came up with a set of mathematical rules that modeled the growth of real plants. The basic idea is very simple. Start with a single piece of stem; a “shoot”, if you like. Now, each tick of the clock you take each shoot […]
