Programs in Cosmos cannot generally read the code of neighbouring
programs. In contrast, programs in Ray's Tierra system do have this
ability, and this is why parasites and other sorts of ecological
interactions emerge fairly easily in it. A mechanism was built into
Cosmos to simulate the reading of neighbouring code using the
program's general communications input and output apparatus, as
described in Chapter 4 (Sections 4.3.7
and 4.6.1). However, the mechanism is still
more complicated than in Tierra, and would require somewhat more
evolutionary innovation in order to be utilised effectively. A set of
experiments was conducted in order to test the mechanism and see
whether parasites could evolve in Cosmos. The non-default parameter
setting is shown in Table 6.11.
Table 6.11:
Non-default Parameter Value for
Readable Neighbouring Code Experiments.
