Digital life
This is fairly old now, but some students at MSU developed a simulated world platform where virus-like program/organisms fight for survival and control of limited resources. This combined with random changes to their code creates evolution. Their platform is called Avida. I ran it for a little while and it was kind of cool, but I didn’t know how to use it to it’s full potential so I couldn’t see how cool it really was.
My biggest problem with it is that they’re calling it an instance of evolution and they’re saying it could be used to develop solutions to problems we don’t know how to solve yet. I disagree. From what I read it appears they have to set up rewards artificially, and these have to trigger when certain milestones are reached. That can’t be done for problems we don’t know how to solve because we don’t know what’s closer or further from the proper solution. Also, with each step being rewarded we’re not really talking about evolution anymore, it’s much more like intelligent design. Greyhounds didn’t evolve naturally, they were bred through centuries of dog racing to be skinny and fast. These skills didn’t necessarily help them survive, but they helped them win races for their owners. That’s the difference here too: the scientists are providing the end goal and essentially “breeding” the viruses to reach the goal.
Despite my problems with it, I’ll be very interested to see where they go with their work.