avida - Auto-adaptive genetic system for Artificial Life research

avida-qt-viewer

This is the graphical viewer for the Avida auto-adaptive genetic system.

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.

Make a new working directory for the experiment you want to run, and put the starting data in it. You can copy standard starting data and modify it with:

cp /usr/share/avida/* . -r

You can run the program from inside that directory, or select your working directory once started.

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/doc/alive/data/. 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/.