Avida is Caltech's Digital Life Laboratory "auto-adaptive genetic system".
I first came across it when I heard one of the DLab researchers (Adami, I think) give talk at Astrobio'04.
Thought it was neat. And filed under "check it out sometime".
The recent discussion on evolution and synthetic life made me think of it again, so I visited the DLab website, and behold, there is an Avida executable for the Mac.
5 minutes later I am command of my own 100x100 world, running a 10,000 generation mutation and adaption experiment - few thousand generations in I see 12 surviving lineages, and it looks like a couple of them are finally gaining fitness advantages.
Thinking about the setup, I think I chose a stupid reproduction model (offspring placed randomly on the grid - like weed dispersal - should have gone for neighbour colony models).
Anyway, it is tres cool, colour animated generations, you choose the landscape map, and you set everything you want in the input file. Like "game of life" but more realistic and fun, plus you can do some serious exploring of mutation rate implications, how inheritance strategies work, and general insight into evolutionary strategies.
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