Evolution of Cooperative Information Gathering in Self-Replicating Digital Organisms

We describe a study in the application of digital evolution to the problem of cooperative information gathering. In digital evolution, self-replicating computer programs evolve to perform tasks and optimize resource usage in order to survive within a user defined computational environment. Instruction-level mutations during replication and CPU-cycle rewards for desired behavior produce natural selection within the population. The evolution is open-ended and not limited by human preconceptions. The contributions of this work are (1) to demonstrate that cooperative information gathering can evolve in digital organisms and (2) to provide insight into the fundamental processes governing evolution of such behavior.