avida - Auto-adaptive genetic system for Artificial Life research

avida-primitive [options]

avida-viewer [options]

avida-qt-viewer

Avida is an auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Digital or Artificial Life research. The Avida system is based on concepts similar to those employed by the tierra program developed by Tom Ray. In lay terms, Avida is a digital world in which simple computer programs mutate and evolve. More technically, it is a population of self-reproducing strings with a Turing-complete genetic basis subjected to Poisson-random mutations. The population adapts to the combination of an intrinsic fitness landscape (self-reproduction) and an externally imposed (extrinsic) fitness function provided by the researcher.

By studying this system, one can examine evolutionary adaptation, general traits of living systems (such as self-organization), and other issues pertaining to theoretical or evolutionary biology and dynamic systems. The power of Avida is that it gives us a controllable digital system in which to study the theories of evolutionary biology. Often, we can study elements of evolutionary theory that are difficult or impossible in biological systems.

-g[enesis] <filename>

Set genesis file to be <filename>

-h[elp]

Help on options (this listing)

-e[vents]

Print a list of all known events

-s[eed] <value>

Set random seed to <value>

-viewer <value>

Sets Viewer to <value>

-v[ersion]

Prints the version number

-set <name> <value>

Overide the genesis file

-l[oad] <filename>

Load a clone file

-loadpop <filename>

Load a saved population file (precedence over load)

-a[nalyze]

Process analyze.cfg instead of normal run.

Avida is a joint project of the Digital Life Laboratory, headed by Chris Adami, at the California Institute of Technology (http://dllab.caltech.edu/) and Richard Lenski's Microbial Evolution laboratory at Michigan State university (http://www.msu.edu/~lenski/). For more info on these groups or their research, please visit the links above.

This manual page was written by Miriam Ruiz <little_miry@yahoo.es>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).

There is a directory with some starting data you can use as a base for your research in /usr/share/alive/. You just have to copy the contents of that directory wherever you want and start running avida-viewer there. You can find HTML documentation about avida in /usr/share/doc/alive/html/.

There are two viewer programs available, avida-viewer, which is a text mode one, using ncurses library, and avida-qt-viewer, which is a graphics viewer using qt widgets under the X Windowing System.