Universal Biosignatures for the Detection of Life

biosignature_movie_1.mpg (987 KB) An MPEG format movie showing the development of the MAB in Avida as described in Chapter 2. This movie shows the relative abundances of 28 Avida instructions in a single typical evolutionary run. This run was seeded with the standard progenitor (listed in Table 2.1) and run for 200,000 updates with copy mutation probability $\mu$=0.01 randomizing mutations per execution of the COPY instruction. The red curve shows the initial distribution of instructions present in the progenitor population, while the blue curve shows the actual distribution of instructions at any particular point in time. The distribution was sampled every 100 updates. The run illustrated here is one of twenty-five runs used to generate the "0.01" curve in Figure 2.4a.