Minev

The Smallest Tierra-style Artificial Life Program Ever!

Minev is designed to compile and run on any ANSI C system, no matter how minimal. To the best of my knowledge, it uses only ANSI constructs and exceeds no minimum limits. I haven't found anything smaller than an 8086 IBM PC running DOS 3.1 to run it on, but it works on that. (Now that there's a gcc port for the HP48 calculator, I'd love it if someone could see if this works on that...)

I've tested it on Minix, Linux, DOS, Windows (9x and NT families), HP-UX, Solaris, SunOS, MacOS, AIX, Tru64, and a few more I can't remember right now. It will probably work for you.

Minev 2.0 fixes several critical bugs in Minev 1.0, and thanks to a substantial rewrite is also up to 40% faster. It also adds several new, semi-graphical features and utilities for analyzing the state of the system.

Minev is public domain software. You can do anything you like with it. If I actually thought anyone could make money with it, I might put it under the GPL, but I'm not that proud of it. I just hope that someone out there will find it interesting.

If you don't know what Tierra is, I wrote up an explanation of how it works and what results I've seen, or you could head over here for an intro to alife, and then read about what Tierra is. Minev is not a 16-bit Minix port of Tierra - that probably isn't possible. It is a from-scratch reimplementation, using ideas gleaned from the Tierran literature. By default, it doesn't even use Tierra's original opcode set, but it's possible to compile a version that does.

You can download it in gzip'ed tar format, or ZIP format, or Minix-friendly compressed tar format.

Even smaller...

I figured out a way to do it in even less space, but I haven't had time to do anything about it.