The code with the computational advantage spreads and collides with the others. Writing robust computer programs is nearly impossible, he said, but Avida has made the process of growing them easy. It all comes from scratch. The digital petri dish can be likened to a population or culture of programs that lives together and solves computational problems in parallel, in other words a massively parallel processor, Adami said. But the scale is exceptionally massive compared to contemporary architecture, with the possiblity for as many as a million programs operating at once.
Standard architecture requires a schedule telling the processor the order of tasks.
Avida is a self-scheduling parallel process, Adami said. So further work with the software could help developers learn how to write such a program, he said. Aliens, fruit flies and fungi The article compares the digital petri dish with the results of mutations to E. Coli, bacteria that live in the colon and are used widely for genetic experiments. The digital dish provided far more accurate results than the laboratory and can answer certain biology questions that are out of reach either practically or ethically. Lenski at the Michigan State University sees the approach as a tool that can complement, not replace, traditional studies of bacterial competition in the laboratory.