First posted 14.9.04
Updated 30.12.04

The Compucology Project involves multidisciplinary experimental and theoretical work investigating the application of biological principles to traditional technological design problems. The Project is also concerned with the degree to which the fusing of the biological and the technological is possible, useful, and safe. For a number of reasons, software is probably the most complex and fastest developing technological artefact yet devised – it already displays many of the characteristics of biological systems. The existing field of computational ecology, however, is a branch of biology concerned with the simulation of real-world ecologies. We propose, that a compucology should be understood as a highly complex ecology of software or other entities able to undergo artificial evolution, free of the constraints of any particular real-world simulation, and which may or may not be configured to perform useful work at any given time. The reinvention of biology through technology has many advantages, provides a powerful way to approach a number of currently intractable design problems, but clearly carries new risks. Neither is such an evolutionary approach restricted to the immaterial realm of software, and thus includes possibilities such as that of sexually reproducing machines.