Compiled for MacOS Sierra.
Tierra is a foundational step in the exploration of Artificial Life and genetic algorithms. In 1992 it demonstrated self-modifying programs 'evolving' and improving.
The appeal of the program is that you can start with a 80 step program, that will simplify itself down, over generations to a 25-step program that achieves the same goal.
It's interesting now because lots of work has been done in the area of Open Ended Evolution in the form of Artificial Life over the last five years.
At the time, it was a logical step between Core Wars, and Avida.
This is a Macintosh implementation of Tom Ray's Tierra: http://life.ou.edu/tierra/
It's an independent implementation by Simon Fraser , who write a Mac OS Classic version many moons ago: http://www.smfr.org/work/sfi/mactierra/
This is a Mac OS X rewrite, with a platform-neutral engine, and a Cocoa front-end. It requires Mac OS X 10.5.4 (Leopard) or later.
Please send bugs and feedback to Simon Fraser <smfr at smfr . org>
Building requires Leopard (10.5.4) and Xcode 3.1 or later.
First, open Source/userinterface/cocoa/3rd party/GraphX/Source/Graph Suite.xcodeproj. Get Info on the Graph Suite item at the top of the Files hierarchy, and change the Build Products location to MacTierra/build (same directory as used by MacTierra.xcodeproj). Build Release and Debug (either target).
Now open MacTierra.xcodeproj, choose the MacTierra target, and build (Release or Debug, as you wish; Release will run much faster).
Use Command-Option-N to make a new, empty soup with mutation turned off.
MacTierra creates a "genebank" file at ~/Library/Application Support/MacTierra/Genebank.sql, in which it stores successful genotypes. You can view the genebank via the Window->Genebank menu item. Genotypes can be dragged into an empty soup to run them.
0.8 First release of Mac OS X version.
1.0 Rebuilt on Mac OS X 10.6, with Boost 1.44.0 Built 64-bit. Significantly faster than 0.8 Mac OS X 10.5 or later is required to run. New soup format; soup files not compatible with 0.8.
Saving soups in XML format crashes sometimes (bug in boost serialization). Soups may not be compatible between 32- and 64-bit binaries.