Scientists create digital bug-life

berniecase wrote to us with coverage of the creation of digital life, in a computer-petri dish. The bugs succed by getting more processing time and thus living more, and reproducing more. This type of experiment has been going on for while, which sparks the debate of digital life? Is it coming? Is it already here? Will it never arrive?

Comments

There's a very good FAQ about this

[Kaa]

Big, well-written and funny: called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation (FAQ in comp.ai.genetic). Here is the relevant extact:

Obtaining copies of this guide
This FAQ is available between postings on rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/ai-faq/genet ic/ as the files: part1 to part6. The FAQ may also be retrieved by e-mail from . Send a message to the mail-server with "help" and "index" in the body on separate lines for more information.

A PostScript version is also available. This looks really crisp (using boldface, italics, etc.), and is available for those who prefer offline reading. Get it from ENCORE (See Q15.3) in file FAQ/hhgtec.ps.gz (the ASCII text versions are in the same directory too). In Germany, its also available from the SyS ftp-server: lumpi.informatik.uni-dortmund.de:/pub/EA/docs/hhgt ec.ps.gz

ENCORE is a set of FTP sites, including
ftp://ftp.krl.caltech.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html
ftp://ftp.cs.wayne.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.htm
ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html
and others


Kaa