Tierra[0], written by Tom Ray[1], immediately comes to mind. I was captivated when I read about it, as a teenager, in Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[2]. Having played Core War[3], the description of Tierra in Levy's book inspired me to play around with making a virtual machine in Turbo Pascal and trying my hand at making a pale and naive clone. It was a lot of fun, and arguably has influenced a lot of my thinking about the origin of biological life.<p>[0] <a href="https://tomray.me/tierra/whatis.html" rel="nofollow">https://tomray.me/tierra/whatis.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Ray" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Ray</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.stevenlevy.com/artificial-life" rel="nofollow">https://www.stevenlevy.com/artificial-life</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War</a>
This is a cool finding; I did not know it was still an active area of study with all the work on ML and LLMs these days. I have done some amateur exploration of the space and the result does not surprise me: <a href="https://github.com/ehbar/evol" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ehbar/evol</a>
This reminds me of multi-head neural nets where there is synergy from having to learn two or more tasks at the same time that helps them all.
An independent reproduction of the main result: <a href="https://github.com/vicgalle/coevolution-soup" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vicgalle/coevolution-soup</a>