RETROSPECTIVE
Barricelli’s Universe
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day...
At 10:38 p.m. on March 3, 1953, Italian-Norwegian mathematical biologist Nils Aall Barricelli (1912-1993) inoculated a 5K digital universe with random numbers generated by playing cards drawn from a shuffled deck. A viral geneticist with a background in physics, Barricelli was granted access to the computer at the Institute for Advanced Study (see Make, Volume 06, page 190) to investigate the role of symbiosis in the origin of life.
“A series of numerical experiments are being made with the aim of verifying the possibility of an evolution ...
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