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A PROPOSAL TO CREATE A NETWORK-WIDE BIODIVERSITY RESERVE FOR DIGITAL ORGANISMS

Thomas S. Ray
ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories
2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-02, Japan
ray@hip.atr.co.jp, ray@santafe.edu, ray@udel.edu
March 21, 1995

Abstract:

The proposed project will create a very large, complex and inter-connected region of cyberspace that will be inoculated with digital organisms which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural selection. The objective is to set off a digital analog to the Cambrian explosion of diversity, in which multi-cellular digital organisms (parallel processes) will spontaneously increase in diversity and complexity. If successful, this evolutionary process will allow us to find the natural form of parallel and distributed processes, and will generate extremely complex digital information processes that fully utilize the capacities inherent in our parallel and networked hardware. The project will be funded through the donation of spare CPU cycles from thousands of machines connected to the net, by running the reserve as a low priority background process on participating nodes.





Thomas S.Ray
Tue Aug 1 16:54:18 JST 1995