An idea

It occured to me that it should be relatively simple to create an simple ai by using mud's to evolve it. It would take a bunch of computers, and the ability to program.

make one machine the mud server, make sure it can handle many thousands of connections.

make one machine a sex machine, to handle reproduction.

the others will be caretakers, to handle the organisms being evolved.

if the population drops below 10 on any given caretaker machine, the sex machine spawns a completely new genome, runs the genome through a script debugger that turns the genome into a script for the caretakers to run, then passes it off to a caretaker to take care of.

each script should be able to access thousands of variables per organism.

organisms would be able to reproduce randomly and asexually at first, with the parents genome passing itself off to the sex machine for mutation addition (and a little lengthening to future complexity). as the organisms learn to do simple things, like eat or drink, those will become criteria for asexual reproduction, favoring organisms that take care of themselves. since they'd all be on the same server, interaction would a part of their lives from the beginning. it would be possible (eventually) for people to log in and interact with them.

Goe, just passing on thoughts.