Nils Aall Barricelli

• The first person (to my knowledge) to run evolutionary experiments on computers

  • Barricelli was an Italian-Norwegian mathematician with a strong interest in evolution and symbiogenesis
  • Worked at Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, over the period 1953-1956

• Created a very simple model to capture the properties of self-reproduction and mutation

  • Basically a one-dimensional cellular automata

Notes: