Design Details of the Cosmos Platform

Despite the potential problems associated with Tierra and similar platforms discussed in the previous chapter, it was decided that it would be worthwhile to develop and investigate a system built according to the same principles. Reasons for doing this included the following:

• To develop a better appreciation of the issues involved in designing such a system.
• To enable an extensive analysis of the behaviour of such a system to be conducted and reported.
• To observe possible differences in behaviour between the new system and existing Tierra-like platforms, arising from differences in design.
• To get a better idea of how serious some of the potential problems mentioned in the previous chapter might be, and how they might be resolved.

Issues such as these are relevant because the approach pioneered by Tom Ray with Tierra is fairly widely used, and its validity is fairly widely accepted, within the artificial life community. A new Tierra-like platform, called Cosmos,^4.1 was therefore developed. The design details and relevant implementational issues are discussed in the rest of this chapter.