Posted on Wednesday, November 26 2003 - 11:03 AM - Professors
CNET: “...In August 1961, researcher Victor Vyssotsky invented a game, dubbed Darwin, in which small programs competed with one another to dominate a digital landscape. His colleague Douglas McIlroy programmed much of the game, including the code that would run the simulation. The third researcher, Robert Morris Sr., created a lethal digital creature that evolved and passed along its successful attack to its progeny. ”It was clear that by tinkering the rules to introduce a bit of uncertainty into the game, we could have revived it after Morris' devastating entry, but we had other things to do,“ said Mr. McIlroy, now an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Dartmouth College. The game ran on an IBM 7090 system and was largely forgotten.”
