Avida (nonfiction)

Avida is an artificial life software platform to study the evolutionary biology of self-replicating and evolving computer programs (digital organisms).

Avida is under active development by Charles Ofria's Digital Evolution Lab at Michigan State University; the first version of Avida was designed in 1993 by Ofria, Chris Adami and C. Titus Brown at Caltech, and has been fully reengineered by Ofria on multiple occasions since then.

The software was originally inspired by the Tierra system. Tierra simulated an evolutionary system by introducing computer programs that competed for computer resources, specifically processor (CPU) time and access to main memory. In this respect it was similar to Core Wars, but differed in that the programs being run in the simulation were able to modify themselves, and thereby evolve. Tierra's programs were artificial life organisms.

Unlike Tierra, Avida assigns every digital organism its own protected region of memory, and executes it with a separate virtual CPU. By default, other digital organisms cannot access this memory space, neither for reading nor for writing, and cannot execute code that is not in their own memory space.

A second major difference is that the virtual CPUs of different organisms can run at different speeds, such that one organism executes, for example, twice as many instructions in the same time interval as another organism. The speed at which a virtual CPU runs is determined by a number of factors, but most importantly, by the tasks that the organism performs: logical computations that the organisms can carry out to reap extra CPU speed as bonus.

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links:

• Avida @ Wikipedia
• Avida @ GitHub
• Avida developer's site
• How to Start Using Avida
• Takashi Ikegami - a professor for at the University of Tokyo. He specializes in artificial life and complexity, and has been known to engage on the border between art and science.