Catching up on my reading.....
FYI, random death can be achevied today by using an outbound teleporter to nowhere.
Since bots can't see or detect teleporters (unless they do something very very sophisticated such as monitoring the presense of and unexplained disapparance of surrounding picket bots) evolution is powerless to adapt to such random sources of death. As I've described elsewhere, I prefer non-random death as a means of keeping populations in check since it allows for selection to favor adaptations which increase survival and reproductive sucess. I thus plan to one day implement a built-in uber-preditor whose effectiness is a function of user-set sim population levels. Runnign a littel faster than the next guy would be selected for...
This would provide a more "natural" means of population control than say, auto-costs. Auto-costs are unnatural as they violate locatlity and causation rules in the same way an asteroid strike does I.e. a short term population spike by a fast beeder on one side of the sim has an unexplained and difficult to adapt to impact on the costs imposed on other organisms on the other side of the sim.
