Digital organism - Citizendia

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A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Foundations of modern biology There are five unifying principles eVolution is the third Album by eLDee, it was due to be released in 2008 An adaptation is a characteristic of an Organism that has been favored by Natural selection and In Population genetics, genetic drift is the accumulation of random events that change the makeup of a gene pool slightly but often compound over time In Population genetics, gene flow (also known as gene migration) is the transfer of Alleles of Genes from one Population to another In biology mutations are changes to the Nucleotide sequence of the Genetic material of an organism Natural selection is the process by which favorable Heritable traits become more common in successive Generations of a Population of Speciation is the Evolutionary process by which new biological Species arise The wide range of evidence of common descent of living things strongly indicates the occurrence of Evolution and provides a wealth of information on the natural processes Although evidence of early Life is scarce and often difficult to interpret it appears that life appeared on Earth relatively soon (on the Geologic time scale) after Evolutionary thought, the idea that species change over time has roots in antiquity in the ideas of the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Muslims theory of transmutation had early origins in the speculations and hypotheses of Erasmus Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Objections to evolution have been raised ever since various evolutionary ideas came to prominence around the start of the nineteenth century Cladistics is the hierarchical classification of Species based on evolutionary ancestry Ecological genetics is the study of Genetics in the context of the interactions among organisms and between the organisms and their environment Evolutionary developmental biology ( evolution of development or informally evo-devo) is a field of Biology that compares the developmental processes Human evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the part of biological Evolution concerning the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct Species Molecular evolution is the process of evolution at the scale of DNA, RNA, and Proteins Molecular evolution emerged as a scientific field in the 1960s as Population genetics is the study of the Allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four evolutionary forces Natural selection, Genetic See also Biological reproduction Self-replication is any process by which a thing might make a copy of itself Computer programs (also software programs, or just programs) are instructions for a Computer. In Genetic algorithms mutation is a Genetic operator used to maintain Genetic diversity from one generation of a population of chromosomes to Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolution. eVolution is the third Album by eLDee, it was due to be released in 2008 Note The term model has a different meaning in Model theory, a branch of Mathematical logic. This is closely related to the area of artificial life. Artificial life (commonly Alife or alife) is a field of study and an associated art form which examine Systems related to Life, its processes

History

Digital organisms can be traced back to the game Core War, in which computer programs had to compete with each other and try to stop the opponent from executing. Core War (or Core Wars) is a Programming game in which two or more battle programs (called warriors) compete for the control of the MARS It turned out that one of the winning strategies was to replicate as fast as possible, which had the result that the opponent was deprived of all computational resources. A Strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning A resource, or system resource, is any physical or virtual component of limited availability within a computer system Programs in the Core War game were also able to mutate themselves and each other by overwriting instructions in the simulated "memory" in which this game took place. This allowed competing programs to embed damaging instructions in each other that caused errors (terminating the process that reads it), "enslave processes" (making an enemy program work for you), or even change strategies mid-game and heal themselves.

Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos National Laboratory took the idea from Core War one step further in his core world system. Steen Rasmussen was born in Elsinore Denmark, in 1955 He is an Artificial Life scientist who has published numerous reviews and reports in the Journal Artificial Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a He introduced a genetic algorithm that would automatically write programs. However, Rasmussen did not observe the evolution of complex and stable programs. It turned out that the programming language in which core world programs were written was very brittle, and more often than not mutations would completely destroy the functionality of a program. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer.

The first to solve the issue of program brittleness was Tom Ray with his Tierra system. Tom Ray (born 2 August, 1919) is an American Animator who began work at Warner Bros Tierra is a Computer simulation developed by Ecologist Thomas S Tierra was similar to core world. However, Ray made some key changes to the programming language such that mutations were much less likely to destroy a program. With these modifications, he observed for the first time computer programs that did indeed evolve in a meaningful and complex way.

Later, Chris Adami, Titus Brown, and Charles Ofria started developing their Avida system, which was inspired by Tierra but had again some crucial differences. Christoph Carl H Adami is a professor at the California Institute of Technology and the Keck Graduate Institute. Dr Charles A Ofria is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the director of the Digital Evolution (DEvo Lab at Michigan Avida is an Artificial life software platform to study the Evolutionary biology of self-replicating and evolving computer programs ( Digital organisms. In Tierra, all programs lived in the same address space, and could potentially overwrite or otherwise interfere with each other. In Computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses each of which may correspond to a physical or virtual Memory register, a network host In Avida, on the other hand, each program lives in its own address space. Through this modification, experiments with Avida became much cleaner and easier to interpret than those with Tierra. With Avida, digital organism research has begun to be accepted as a valid contribution to evolutionary biology by a growing number of evolutionary biologists. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University has used Avida extensively in his work. Richard E Lenski (born August 13, 1956) is an American evolutionary biologist. Michigan State University ( MSU) is a co-educational public Research university in East Lansing, Michigan USA. Lenski, Adami, and their colleagues have published in journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). Nature is a prominent Scientific journal, first published on 4 November 1869 The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United

In 1996, Andy Pargellis created a Tierra-like system called Amoeba that evolved self-replication from a randomly seeded initial condition.

History

See also

Further reading