Playing cod: PC owners in virtual fish experiment

A Californian company is inviting computer owners to turn their machines into a habitat for schools of virtual fish.

A company called Dalilab, after Distributed Artificial Life, is aiming to build a giant virtual ecosystem, where virtual fish can live and evolve.

The system is based on the ecology of the Indonesian ocean. Anyone taking part can create any number of fish, which will swim around the internet, eating, breeding and evolving into new and exotic creatures as they get used to their virtual world.

However, the number of powerful predators is restricted, otherwise everything in the ocean would be eaten too fast.

Each fish is tagged, so you can see where it began its life and where it has been. The developers also hope to enable users to stuff messages into their fish, for other users to read when they find them.

The system follows popular distributed computing projects like the Seti@home project, where private computers across the world help in the search for aliens.

Instead of doing nothing when the computer is idle, Seti@home computers analyse signals from radio telescopes to see if they contain patterns that may indicate extraterrestrial intelligence.