Evolving Intelligence

This article at New Scientist reviews some new developments in artificial life using a software package called Avida to evolve memory in simulated organisms.

"The big question is: how did we get here? Our intelligence didn't evolve all at once," says Pennock. "You need certain ingredients. Memory is one."

Experiments in Avida nearly always start with the simplest possible organisms, ones that can only clone themselves. To make them evolve, the experimenters release them into a competitive environment where the prize is an amount of "food" - aka processing time - which allows organisms to produce more clones.