Nils Barricelli - artificial life, coevolution, self-adaptation

Nils Aall Barricelli was one of the pioneers in evolutionary computation. His publication of "Esempi Numerici di processi di evoluzione", a study in what would now be called artificial life, in the journal Methodos, in 1954 is perhaps the earliest published record of an evolutionary simulation. The paper was republished in 1957 in English, and detailed the results of programs that were run at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in 1953.