The computer program avida is an auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Artificial Life research. The avida system is based on concepts similar to those employed by the tierra program, that is to say it is a population of self-reproducing strings with a Turing-complete genetic basis subjected to Poisson-random mutations. The population adapts to the combination of an intrinsic fitness landscape (self-reproduction) and an externally imposed (extrinsic) fitness function provided by the researcher. By studying this system, one can examine evolutionary adaptation, general traits of living systems (such as self-organization), and other issues pertaining to theoretical or evolutionary biology and dynamic systems.
This page is meant for those people interested in using avida as a tool for themselves. It includes the most up-to-date versions of the software (currently at 1.3.1), as well as instructions on how to use this software and information any problems which people have encountered with it.
Currently, avida has been compiled on most Unix platform and (thanks to help from Dennis Adler of Microsoft) has been ported to Window 95 and NT. We'd love to hear from anyone who has successfully ported it elsewhere. Both distributions below come will all of the sourcecode for avida and the Windows version also has an executable. Since there are so many Unix versions out there, we are not currently providing executables for any of them, but the software is written to be very platform independent, and we haven't had any problems porting it.
If you have any questions, e-mail avida-help@krl.caltech.edu and we will see what we can do to be of assistance.
| Avida version 1.0.1 for Win95/NT |
| Avida version 1.0.1 for Unix |
| Avida version 1.2 alpha for Win95/NT |
| Avida version 1.3.0 for Unix Systems |
| Avida version 1.3.0 for Win98/NT |
Page maintained by Charles Ofria
Send all comments to
charles@krl.caltech.edu