Avida For Mac

Avida is an open source and free digital evolution research platform.

Natural organisms take hours to years to produce their next generation of offspring. Studying the evolution of these creatures takes great patience and often requires interpreting information from incomplete data or fossil records. With digital organismso ne can produce hundreds to thousands of generations per hour while recording every detail of their evolution.

In Avida, a population of self-replicating computer programs is subjected to external pressures (such as limited resources and mutations ) and allowed to evolve subject to natural selection.

In Avida, Darwinian evolution acts on populations of self-replicating computer programs with a Turing complete genetic basis. These "digital organisms" experience natural selection through random mutations and competition for limited resources.

This is not a mere simulation of evolution -- digital organisms in Avida evolve to survive in a complex computational environment and will adapt to perform entirely new traits in ways never expected by the researchers, some of which seem highly creative.

Data about each individual is saved to track the fate of the population and analyzed to help answer our many research questions.