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.

PS: I will admit that I haven't run it for long so if you find interesting results, do let me know

It would be interesting to see screenshots and interesting results.

I wrote a similar artificial life program, called Bluedogs. The hard part was tweaking the constants of the digital universe so the creatures would quickly evolve useful traits. You can see it at http://tamale.net/bluedogs/.

So this is sort of like a CoreWars incubator?

I ran PyPond_with_graphics.py and got a list of 1000 numbers spit out. Any hints on how to run it properly?

The bottom line of ...withGraphics creates a Pond but gives the parameter visual=False.

That should be visual=True. I still get the numbers dump after that, though I also get the visualization.

should have seen that. thanks. It seems to work now- is it normal for the organisms to spell out "Free Us" in the little graphics window?

I would probably be eligble for Nobel Prize if organisms spell that out! But, again, you never know -- it is evolution.

Thanks for pointing this out. I have fixed it.