C.: Clever creatures: Case studies of evolved digital organisms

We present a “bestiary ” of three digital organisms (self-replicating computer programs) that evolved in three dif-ferent experimental environments in the Avida platform. The ancestral environments required the evolving organ-isms to use memory in different ways as they gathered in-formation from the environment and made behavioral de-cisions. Each organism exhibited a behavior or algorithm of particular interest: 1) simple step-counting odometer; 2) clever low-level computation; and 3) pronounced mod-ularity in both program structure and program function-ality. We present descriptive in-depth analysis of the case study organisms, with a focus on the structure and opera-tion of the evolved algorithms that produce the individu-als ’ fitness enhancing behaviors