NAME
avida - Auto-adaptive genetic system for Artificial Life research
SYNOPSIS
avida-qt-viewer
DESCRIPTION
This is the graphical viewer for the Avida auto-adaptive genetic
system.
The Avida system is based on concepts similar to those employed by the
tierra program developed by Tom Ray. In lay terms, Avida is a digital
world in which simple computer programs mutate and evolve. More
technically, it is a population of self-reproducing strings with a
Turing-complete genetic basis subjected to Poisson-random mutations.
The population adapts to the combination of an intrinsic fitness
landscape (self-reproduction) and an externally imposed (extrinsic)
fitness function provided by the researcher.
By studying this system, one can examine evolutionary adaptation,
general traits of living systems (such as self-organization), and other
issues pertaining to theoretical or evolutionary biology and dynamic
systems. The power of Avida is that it gives us a controllable digital
system in which to study the theories of evolutionary biology. Often,
we can study elements of evolutionary theory that are difficult or
impossible in biological systems.
USAGE
Make a new working directory for the experiment you want to run, and
put the starting data in it. You can copy standard starting data and
modify it with:
cp /usr/share/avida/* . -r
You can run the program from inside that directory, or select your
working directory once started.
AUTHOR
Avida is a joint project of the Digital Life Laboratory, headed by
Chris Adami, at the California Institute of Technology
(http://dllab.caltech.edu/) and Richard Lenski’s Microbial Evolution
laboratory at Michigan State university (http://www.msu.edu/~lenski/).
For more info on these groups or their research, please visit the links
above.
This manual page was written by Miriam Ruiz <little_miry@yahoo.es>, for
the Debian project (but may be used by others).
SEE ALSO
There is a directory with some starting data you can use as a base for
your research in /usr/share/doc/alive/data/. You just have to copy the
contents of that directory wherever you want and start running
avida-viewer there. You can find HTML documentation about avida in
/usr/share/doc/alive/html/.
noviembre 23, 2004 AVIDA(1)