Overview

You’ve now learned about both ecological dynamics and evolutionary dynamics. However, previous systems have isolated those two forces, which isn’t how biological evolution actually works. When you combine ecological and evolutionary dynamics together, things get complicated fast, but that’s where artificial life can be the most exciting! Today we’ll discuss my particular research system that is focused on the co-evolutionary dynamics of symbiosis specifically: Symbulation.

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class, you should be able to:

  • Explain how symbionts interact with hosts in the system
  • Identify two examples of the evolutionary effects symbionts can have on their hosts

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

  • Expand on Symbulation to conduct a novel investigation

Resources

You should read the following (note, these papers both use the same underlying system, so the methods will have overlapping information, but they are written by different authors and so reading both methods may help you grasp all the details better. Definitely read all the rest of both sections though!):

Checks

Submit answers to the following on Moodle:

  • How does the genome structure and idea of logic tasks compare between Symbulation and Avida?
  • From these two papers, what are all the ways that symbionts can impact their hosts (positive and negative)? (There is actually a third, but there isn’t a paper on it yet!)
  • Make sure to clone down the Symbulation starter code before class