Cell Simulation

As a student of biology, I'm often amazed by the intricate systems that have evolved and I'm frustrated by the thought that we may never know exactly how they came to be. I think this is why I'm interested in artificial evolution; I can create a system that evolves and can record every stage of evolution to trace the changes. That said, I've found that even when you have a complete record of every genome in a system, it can be quite a challenge to untangle evolutionary changes. I hope that in trying to create programs to analyse the information from my artificial evolution, I might create something that can be used to analyse evolution in the real world.

My first large-scale simulation of cells was a simulation of heterocysts. Since then I've wanted to create a more sophisticated and generic cell simulation. I hope to create a sufficiently open-ended system that will allow evolution to create novel behaviours. One major difference from my previous simulations of evolution is that I want to encode virtual proteins in DNA, which will require a method of converting sequences of nucleotides into functions.

The simulation will include a pool of water which will contain the cells and provide them with a challenging environment. It must be sufficiently complex to provide different niches, allowing cells to evolve in different directions.