MacTierra is a Macintosh implementation of Tom Ray’s artificial life program, Tierra, which was originally written for MS-DOS. Tierra aims to study the evolutionary process by the instantiation of evolution in another form, namely in an ecosystem of interacting and competing machine code programs living in the Tierra environment, which emulates a massively parallel computer.
Unlike the original, MacTierra aims to present the user with a highly interactive interface so that simulations can be studied as they are running, saved to a file and restarted later, and the activities of the creatures within them closely monitored.
MacTierra is still under development, and so is likely to contain bugs which could crash your computer. This program is supplied ‘as is’, and you use it at your own risk. I hold no responsibility for damage or loss of data incurred as a result of its use.
MacTierra is currently free of charge, though if you feel inspired to send me money please don't hesitate!
I can be contacted on email (Internet):
smfr@santafe.edu
and by mail:
Simon Fraser
Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Road
Santa Fe NM 87501
Using MacTierra for research purposes
If you intend to use MacTierra for research purposes, please get in touch with me at the address above. First, I would like to be aware of work that is being done with this program, and second, you should contact me so that I can explain exactly how various data are collected in the program. I will be happy to consider adding features that you may need for a particular study.
More info
Please read the enclosed HTML documents, which provide substantial details about this implementation of Tierra. If you don’t have a WWW browser, get one! The pages were formatted using Netscape, which can run without a network connection. Just double-click ‘read-docs.html’, or use ‘Open file…’ on the File menu, and select the file called ‘read-docs.html’.
If you still cannot get a WWW brower, the pages are just text files, so can be opened in any word processor, though you will have to read around the HTML. The pictures are in GIF format.
Enjoy MacTierra, and I look forward to receiving your feedback.