Departing in a new direction after evolved light follower robots, take 500 processor cores spread out in space. Give them a simple instruction set which includes a instruction to copy (DMA) 8 bytes of their code/data to nearby cores (with an error rate of 0.5%). Fill the cores with random junk and set them running. If we graph the bandwidth used (the amount of data transmitted per cycle by the whole system) we get a plot like this:

This explosion in bandwidth use is due to implicit emergence of programs which replicate themselves. There is no fitness function, it’s not a genetic algorithm and there is no guided convergence to a single solution – no ‘telling it what to do’. Programs may arise that cooperate with each other or may exhibit parasitic behaviour as in alife experiments like Tierra, and this could be seen as a kind of self modifying, emergent Amorphous computing – and eventually, perhaps a way of evolving programs in parallel on cheap attiny processor hardware.

In order to replicate, the code needs to push a value onto the stack as the address to start the copy from, and then call the dma instruction to broadcast it. This is one of the 500 cores visualised using Betablocker DS emulator display, the new “up” arrow icon is the dma instruction.

Thinking more physically, the arrangements of the processors in space is a key factor – here are some visualisations. The size of each core increases when it transmits, and it’s colour is set by a hash of the last data transmission – so we can see the rise of communication and the propagation of different strains of successful code.

The source is here and includes the visualisation software which requires fluxus.