And the baby has a baby

When I started posting about this project, I just dove in. Eventually I’ll have to lay out exactly what I’m working on, and how I’m approaching the development of my artificial life forms. That will take some time. For now, have yet another post wherein I entirely fail to explain what’s going on.

Over the weekend, I finished coding the Figure class. It only took 1500 to 1700 lines of code, depending upon how you count and what you count. I still have much testing debugging and documentation to get done before I can finally move on to the interesting parts.

A few days ago, while testing one of many little pieces of the project, I saw the first little program that was produced by the system, instead of hand written by me, reproduce itself, I’m going to paste in the text from my journal. Note that each program copies itself, and adds a small mutation to the end of the child program. The longer the program, the younger it is.

Friday January 19, 2018

2:18:AM

First time I ran a figure I didn’t write.

The size of the realm=3
looking for neighbors.
Going up.
nobody new around.
Reading from out there.
Running baby.
looking for neighbors.
Going up.
party at 0!
Reading from out there.
Figure 0 memory={-4, -17, 3, -9, -13, 6, -8, -19, 9, -3, -19, 12, -6, -18, -1, –
1, -1, -1}
Figure 2 memory={-4, -17, 3, -9, -13, 6, -8, -19, 9, -3, -19, 12, -6, -18, -1, –
1, -1, -1, 3, 17, -14, 18, 15, 22}
Figure 1 memory={-4, -17, 3, -9, -13, 6, -8, -19, 9, -3, -19, 12, -6, -18, -1, –
1, -1, -1, 3, 17, -14}

See that? Baby had a baby!