Tech Shout!

Five European universities are collaborating on the New Ties project, where they plan to create millions of “software beings” i.e. human beings that live in computers. The goal is to study how they interact and evolve. The software beings don’t have names; however they do have distinct characteristics, which include gender, life expectancy, size and metabolism. As they reproduce, their traits will be passed on and they will also be able to learn and gain new characteristics along the way.

Two thousand artificial beings have been created so far in a single computer, but the goal is to create a grid or cluster of computers to host potentially millions of them, said Gusz Eiben, a professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands and the project’s leader. A lot of research has been done in the field of artificial intelligence, but that research hasn’t focused on how artificial beings interact, he said. The results of the research could also be applied to several fields.

But the current system, which operates through just one computer, faces problems with slowness and memory leaks. But Eiben hopes that many of those problems will be solved in about a month when the researchers expand the project and begin to study the social interactions of the software beings.