Meet the Scientist

MTS59 - Charles Ofria - Digital Life

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Created on Wednesday, 06 October 2010 20:30

Written by Carl Zimmer

In this podcast I talk to Charles Ofria, a computer scientist at Michigan State University.

Ofria and his colleagues have created a program called Avida in which digital organisms can multiply and evolve. They are studying many of evolution's deepest questions, such as how complexity evolves from simplicity and why individuals make sacrifices for each other. The evolution unfolding in Avida is also yielded new software that can run robots and sensors in the real world.

Additional Resources:

• Avida Digital Life Platform
• Beacon Bio/computational Evolution in Action CONsortium.

Download the interview: mp3 (45.5 min | 41.5 megs)

Avida Movie:

In this movie, we started with a normal Avida organism in the middle of the population and let it grow for a while before injecting a highly-virulent parasite into the middle.  The hosts are all colored with shades of blue and the parasites are shades of red.

Created by: Luis Zaman

Click to watch the Avida movie (if not playing above).