We are not alone! The ‘Avidians’ have been quietly evolving over thousands of generations.

The ‘Avidians’ have been quietly evolving over thousands of generations in a computer world run by scientists at Michigan State University.

Instead of DNA. this race of digital beings have computer code that is copied, not quite perfectly, every time they ‘breed’. The random copying errors create differences in their code which dictate how well, or badly, they will perform in their simulated world.

The ‘Avida world’ assigns every digital organism its own protected region of memory, and executes it with a separate virtual CPU. By default, other digital organisms cannot access this memory space, neither for reading nor for writing, and cannot execute code that is not in their own memory space.

The virtual CPUs of different organisms can run at different speeds, such that one organism executes, for example, twice as many instructions in the same time interval as another organism. These ‘organisms’ are essentially competing for computer resources, specifically processor (CPU) time and access to main memory.

Early experiments put the Avidians on a grid of cells, and let them live and die there. The grid had a gradient of ‘food’ — cells at one end have more than the ones at the other, where the Avidians begin. After 100 generations of breeding, a mutation led to one of them evolving a “gene” instructing it to move forward. When it landed in a more food-rich cell, it reproduced more quickly, and had more offspring than its rivals.

After thousands more generations, the Avidians had evolved something more impressive: a rudimentary memory. They had started moving towards the food source in a zig-zag motion, changing direction when they were going in the wrong direction. To do that, they had to be able to compare their current cell to the previous one. Robert Pennock, one of the scientists behind the experiments, told New Scientist: “Doing this requires some rudimentary intelligence. You have to be able to assess your situation, realise you’re not going in the right direction, reorient, and then reassess.”