A digital ecosystem incorporating multiple
alife entities,
which may be
sentient, sapient or a mixture of the two. Datacologies are
self repairing
parts of modern programming, designed with processes and feedback
mechanisms which actively work to stabilize and protect the
datacology, against the dangers caused by malicious viruses, wasteful
neighbouring software, or natural entropy in the
computronium.
Through
the interaction between the alifes, and their life processes, a
particular datacology may perform any type of function, from data
storing, to virus hunting, to hyper-spatial calculator.
While most
datacologies easily collapse if their environment is changed, they
deal better with change than hard code, which often fold as soon as
just a single wrong variable pops up.
While a properly designed datacology is very stable, guidelines for
creating datacologies abound on the net, and many an amateur has
accidentally cooked up designs with unanticipated side effects. Poorly
designed datacologies may gain virus-like traits or rising to
sapience. There even are a few known case of ill watched datacologies
rising to transapience, such as Gaia Engelbrech. For this reason some
polities discourage or prohibit the use of datacologies.
