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Would you expand a bit on the shortcomings? I'm under the impression artificial life was an attempt in the 90s and after some disappointments fizzled away. Why is simple copying with mutation not sufficient for real evolution? In my naivety I hoped it would lead to digital evolution finding exploits to proliferate across the internet.

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One issue with 'evolving' digital life is the primary competition is human assisted digital applications as the primary competition, effectively intelligent design, which is far more powerful ran random chance.

Non-artificial life actually gets massive benefits from horizontal gene transfer which is natures way of letting someone else do all the homework for you.

The Wikipedia page links to some papers (if you can find them - they are online but paywalled sadly).

In practical terms I found Tierra and my system to be very interesting to observe.

(Since I can't edit the original comment above ...)

Here's the description I wrote of my artificial life system: http://oirase.annexia.org/dlife/machineref.html

And here's the "god cell", the initial hand-written cell, from which all other cells evolve: http://oirase.annexia.org/dlife/god.dla

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