Tierra (computer simulation)

Tierra is the first artificial life software platform to simulate experiments with Darwinian evolution using artificial organisms. The platform was presented by Thomas S. Ray, 1991, and marks the starting point of an increased research interest in the field of artificial evolution. Many properties of natural evolution could be observed in simulations with Tierra, such as the development of multicellular organisms or the parallel processing.

In Tierra fight self-replicating program units in a limited environment for survival. The evolutionary character comes through randomly occurring error during write operations to fruition.

The programs are written in a style similar to assembler low-level language with particular two special characteristics: the separation of operation and argument as well as location-independent programming. The thus -written programs are very robust under occurrence of mutations.

Several projects were built on Tierra and are still successfully used to investigate complex evolutionary questions, such as Avida.