Tierra is one of the first A-Life systems. Programs in Tierra evolve and breed and compete for CPU time and memory space. It’s pretty cool, and it’s one of those things that I read about as a youngster and made me think computers were awesome. Fortunately, I got to give a presentation on it to the Artificial Evolution class I’m taking.
The entertaining soundbite is that in Tierra we see that life is indistinguishable from a forkbomb, and that reproduction and success is simply a matter of whose forkbomb repeats the quickest.
