Cyberspace now swells with Barricelli’s progeny. Self-replicating strings of arithmetic live out their days in the digital wilds, increasingly independent of ou

Cyberspace now swells with Barricelli’s progeny. Self-replicating strings of arithmetic live out their days in the digital wilds, increasingly independent of our tampering. The fittest bits survive and propagate. Researchers continue to model reduced, pared-down versions of life artificially, while the real world bursts with Boolean beings. Scientists like Venter conjure synthetic organisms, assisted by computer design. Swarms of autonomous codes thrive, expire, evolve, and mutate underneath our fingertips daily. “All kinds of self-reproducing codes are out there doing things,” Dyson says. In our digital lives, we are immersed in Barricelli’s world. If you want to do this for yourself - you can download Tierra - which lets you do a lot of this in a GUI environment. Tierra Info Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) Mac Download: https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/downloads https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/downloads Mac Source Code: https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/ https://github.com/smfr/mactierra/