What Are Quinelings? Charles Hoskinson’s New Digital Lifeform Experiment

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has introduced Quinelings, an experimental framework of self-replicating programs presented as code-based digital creatures. Its 1.0.0 release, called Living Thoughts, stores each program’s typed task and mathematical body in recoverable source code, limits use to local computation with simulated effects, and has not been published to npm. A quine is a program that outputs its own source code; Quinelings add mathematically generated visual bodies while executing tasks such as root finding and water-volume calculations. In a section called the Ranch, users can combine creatures to produce offspring, though its composition policies are labeled experimental. Hoskinson also said on October 18 that he was building a Cardano programming language for intents and privacy-preserving computation using Groth16 proofs.