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Distributed Artificial Life (DLIFE)

By Richard W.M. Jones <rich@annexia.org>

What is DLIFE?

DLIFE is a distributed version of Tom S. Ray's Tierra artificial life program. Note that the machine language used is similar to but not compatible with Tierra. Tom Ray talks about his work (as far as I know, never completed) to create a ``Digital Reserve''. The DLIFE project is a development of this.

In other words, it's an alternative to the tedious process of cracking RC5 keys or searching for aliens. You've got a supercomputer on your desk, let's go and create some life ...

It consists of a highly optimized engine for running the artificial life cells in a virtual machine, written in C, and some Perl scripts which can upload and download cells from central ``cell-bank'' servers.