Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction? - Issue 75: Story

From an office at Carnegie Mellon, my colleague John Miller and I had evolved a computer program with a taste for genocide. This was certainly not our intent. We were not scholars of race, or war. We were interested in the emergence of primitive cooperation. So we built machines that lived in an imaginary society, and made them play a game with each other--one known to engender complex social behavior just as surely as a mushy banana makes fruit flies.