Treating time and space as discrete entities, digital physics hopes to overcome the hurdles that theoretical science faces today. DNA evolution Ecolab Ecolab is both the name of a software package and a research project that is looking at the dynamics of evolution. This site contains the software and copies of all the publications related to it. In this project we are constructing models of such processes, using genetic algorithms to evolve cellular automata to perform computational tasks requiring globally-coordinated information processing. We are attempting to understand in detail the evolutionary mechanisms giving rise to the discovery of global coordination in such systems.
Current research is focused on spatial and behavioral factors leading to ecosystem stability.
The Gecko software itself is currently based on Terry Jones' Echo implementation, but we plan to port it to the Swarm framework. The work at IlliGAL includes theoretical developments and practical applications of GAs. Our homepage is on complex systems research, artificial life, systems science and ecomodeling. LEM is an interactive multi-agent simulation tool implemented in Visual Prolog. LEM could be used for experiments with artificial evolution and simulation of ecosystems with preprogrammed arbitrary complex food web.