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Digital Life and Evolution
mrivorey writes "Discover Magazine has a story about The Digital Evolution Lab at Michigan State University. Scientists there have created virus-like computer programs that replicate, mutate randomly, and compete with each other... in other words, they evolve. Among such feats as learning to add and compare numbers, these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them, by playing dead.
You can download the project yourself from SourceForge." We first mentioned this in early 2003, but it appears to have developed a good deal since then.
Why sex? Meiotic recombination! It's all about avoiding that monoculture...
http://demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/
How we know is more important than what we know.
Its generally clear that sexual reproduction has long term benefits that will help a species... genetic exchange allows multiple benefical mutations to recombine into a single organism rather than competing with each other.
But this benefit is only in the *long term*. What would allow sex to be around long enough in the first place to allow this to come into play? Any individual subgroup is likely to be more successful if they don't have to (1) find mates, (2) maintain all of the extra mechanisms to facilitate recombination, or (3) have only half of their population (the males) actually producing offspring.
There are many alternative hypotheses about how sex could get started (and in what situations it would have short-term benefits) and we're trying to explore these one-by-one in Avida.
Charles Ofria
Director, MSU Digital Evolution Lab
Fortunately, I think that it'll be somewhat difficult to create a true computer virus based on this code. The Avida organisms are written in a virtual assembly language that is quite different from real-world assembly languages. The commands are simplified and designed to do *something* reasonable in just about any situation.
We've done some experiments with more complex genetic languages, but in all cases they just didn't evolve as well without very specialized mutation types.
I can think of a number of ways that it would be possible to design an evolving computer virus, but I hope they're all non-intuitive enough that we have some time before anyone manages to get one working well. I've often though about trying to extend this work into the security arena -- if I didn't have so many projects going at once right now, I'd seriously consider that.
Dr. Charles Ofria
Director, MSU Digital Evolution Lab
This is a very good point. Computer viruses actually have the computer as a "host" and hence fit the definition well. We tend to compare the digital organisms to computer viruses as a way of explaining them to people, but you are right that they're not the same thing.
We are, however, doing some research on viruses within Avida. Specifically, we allow organisms to inject small snippets of code into each other. Sometimes these code segments could have the ability to take over the replication mechanisms inside of the digital organisms host and force them to use up their resources to make more copies of the snippet. These are much closer to the classical definition of a virus.
Dr. Charles Ofria
Director, MSU Digital Evolution Lab