Most observations on the diversity of Tierran creatures have been based on the diversity of size classes. Creatures of different sizes are clearly genetically different, as their genomes are of different sizes. Different sized creatures would have some difficulty engaging in recombination if they were sexual, thus it is likely that they would be different species. In a run of 526 million instructions, 366 size classes were generated, 93 of which achieved abundances of five or more individuals. In a run of 2.56 billion instructions, 1180 size classes were generated, 367 of which achieved abundances of five or more.
Each size class consists of a number of distinct genotypes which also vary
over time. There exists the potential for great genetic diversity within a
size class. There are 32
distinct genotypes of size 80, but how many
of those are viable self-replicating creatures? This question remains
unanswered, however some information has been gathered through the use
of the automated genebank manager.
In several days of running the genebanker, over 29,000 self-replicating genotypes of over 300 size classes accumulated. The size classes and the number of unique genotypes banked for each size are listed in Table 1. The genotypes saved to disk can be used to inoculate new soups individually, or collections of these banked genotypes may be used to assemble ``ecological communities''. In ``ecological'' runs, the mutation rates can be set to zero in order to inhibit evolution.