

Meet the Father of Digital Life - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/14/mutation/meet-the-father-of-digital-life?utm_source=tss&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=linkfrom

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juliangamble
_Cyberspace now swells with Barricelli’s progeny. Self-replicating strings of
arithmetic live out their days in the digital wilds, increasingly independent
of our tampering. The fittest bits survive and propagate. Researchers continue
to model reduced, pared-down versions of life artificially, while the real
world bursts with Boolean beings. Scientists like Venter conjure synthetic
organisms, assisted by computer design. Swarms of autonomous codes thrive,
expire, evolve, and mutate underneath our fingertips daily. “All kinds of
self-reproducing codes are out there doing things,” Dyson says. In our digital
lives, we are immersed in Barricelli’s world._

If you want to do this for yourself - you can download Tierra - which lets you
do a lot of this in a GUI environment.

Tierra Info Page:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_\(computer_simulation\))

Mac Download:
[https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/downloads](https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/downloads)

Mac Source Code:
[https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/](https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/)

