Barricelli translation and commentary submitted

I am really pleased to share the news that the side project I’ve been working on to produce an English translation of Nils Aall Barricelli’s groundbreaking 1954 paper Esempi Numerici di Processi di Evoluzione, together with an accompanying commentary, has reached a major milestone today with both manuscripts being submitted to the Artificial Life journal.

The project has been developed in collaboration with Giulia Bianchi, a professional Italian translator working in the AI area.

Barricelli’s paper was his first publication on his artificial life simulations and was published in Italian in the Milan-based Methodos journal. It is the first published work to report on computational experiments in artificial life. Despite its significance in the history of the field, copies of the paper are hard to come by. A freely available English-language translation of the paper is therefore much needed. One of the reasons for deciding to submit the works to the Artificial Life journal is that they have a pro-science policy of allowing authors to share author-formatted versions of their publications after a brief embargo period.

One of the reasons the project has taken so long (I started working on it in December 2024!) is because the commentary has developed into a much deeper dive into Barricelli’s work than I had originally anticipated. The commentary covers the personal and scientific context in which Barricelli’s paper was published, the content of the paper, its relation to Barricelli’s earlier and later work on computational evolution, the translation process, and a discussion of the significance and legacy of the work today.

As part of this effort, I have rewritten Barricelli’s simulation in C++ to enable me to reproduce the figures he presented in the paper. The code and the regenerated figures are available at https://github.com/tim-taylor/barricelli54.

I’ll post further news here when I have it about the progress of these papers though the review and publication process.