Tierra was the first thing that came to my mind, too. I'd already played with "Core War" [0] when I learned about Tierra. I so badly wanted to implement somethi

Tierra was the first thing that came to my mind, too. I'd already played with "Core War" [0] when I learned about Tierra. I so badly wanted to implement something like Tierra myself. I couldn't wrap my head around how I could identify the metes and bounds of a given "organism" to isolate it from the rest of the "soup". At the time I learned about Tierra I didn't have a way to get at any of Ray's papers or code. Now I do, but I'd kinda forgotten about it. I really should revisit it. There's probably a lot of fun to be had there. Aside: Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[1] was where I learned about Tierra. That book, along with Levy's "Hackers"[2], and Gleick's "Chaos"[3] were formative books for young me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War [1] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Biology/dp/0679743898 https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bi... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Levy/dp/1449388396 https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453 https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/...