Overview

Avida is a software platform for experiments with self-replicating and evolving computer programs. It provides detailed control over experimental settings and protocols, a large array of measurement tools, and sophisticated methods to analyze and post-process experimental data.

In Avida, each digital organism is a self-contained computing automaton that has the ability to construct new automata. The organism is responsible for building the genome (computer program) that will control its offspring automaton and handing that genome to the Avida world. Avida will then construct virtual hardware for the genome to be run on and determine how this new organism should be placed into the population. In a typical Avida experiment, a successful organism attempts to make an identical copy of its own genome, and Avida randomly places that copy into the population, typically by replacing another member of the population.

In principle, the only assumption made about these self-replicating automata in the core Avida software is that their initial state can be described by a string of symbols (their genome) and that it is possible through processing these symbols to autonomously produce offspring organisms. However, in practice our work has focused on automata with a simple von Neumann architecture that operate on an assembly-like language inspired by the Tierra system. Future research projects will likely have us implement additional organism instantiations to allow us to explore additional biological questions.