Digital Creatures Evolve Firefly Flashing
13th December 2010
Read it. And watch the video.
One hundred and fifty-one years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, digital creatures have evolved to communicate like fireflies in a computer program that blurs the boundaries of life.
Recorded in line-by-line detail, their development in a software platform called Avida may provide insight into biological behavior and inspiration for the design of distributed computer networks.
“Evolutionary programs have been around for a while, but we haven’t seen them applied to distributed computing,” said computer scientist Philip McKinley of Michigan State University. Synchronized communication can be “seen in the natural world. But in Avida, we can go back to how and why it evolved. We can see the key points that allowed this relatively complex behavior to emerge.”