Darwin, the game - In the summer of 1961, a game was created. It was a programming game. Players would write programs that would compete against one another to try and copy themselves as often as possible,

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet - I wanted to do something special for episode 100. It snuck up on me, and I never figured out what to do. I decided to share a couple of other projects, outside of the podcast. -

256 simpler games - In the 1980/s, Stephen Wolfram began considering and experimenting with elementary cellular automata. These are, instead of a 2-dimensional grid, just a one-dimensional row of cells or squares. At least one of these simpler games,

Conway’s game of life - In the previous episode we talked about cellular automata, and John von Neumann’s self-replicating system. While he used cellular automata with 29 different states for each cell, a much simpler game is capable of creating self-...

Von Neumann’s cellular automata - John Von Neumann began considering the idea of self-replicating systems and machines in the 1940/s. Originally, he considered actual robots, who could build other robots that could build other robots.

Barricelli’s numeric organisms - Before Core Wars, or the computer game Darwin, just about as soon as a computer was built that could run the program, a rather obscure Italian scientist named Barricelli, did pioneering experiments in digital life.

The dreaded local minimum - While talking about various and sundry methods of simulating natural processes like evolution in order to solve problems, the concept of a local minimum has cropped up from time to time. Today, we take a closer look at it,

Computer ants? - Evolution based approaches to generating solutions to complex problems, have some drawbacks. They tend to require a great deal of computing resources, such as processer time and data space.

Tit for tat, thanks for that - In Darwin’s original theory, natural selection was considered to be driven by competition. This presents a problem. If it’s all about survival of the fittest, and out competing all others,

Genetic Programming - Today we take a look at my favorite evolutionary approach to making computers solve problems. This one has, now and again, produced results that are competitive with what humans can do. -