Re:How new is this? (Score 1)

It's pretty old. The project you're mentioning was pursued by Thomas Ray in the early 1990s. His rationalization was that there was no way it could cause a widespread crash of all the computers running his simulation because he wrote his evolving code in an interpreted language. He was incapable of grasping the idea that a bug in the interpreter could cause just as much trouble as writing everything in a native language. The upshot is that people would listen to his talk, then politely point out this shortcoming, and then he would call them all fools (he had a bit of an ego problem too).

Eventually, he got the point...

The Artificial Life community has been doing this stuff since the 1950s but they didn't call it Artificial Life until the 1980s when they decided that if they gave the field a trendy name, people would notice it.