Excellent evolution simulation
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For anyone who hasn't seen this before, may I submit to you Gene Pool, a simulation of darwinian evolution and both natural and sexual selection in its purest form.
I have used this program many times to further the cause of evolution education to doubting theists and eager students. Basically, it has a bunch of biomorph-like creatures that go through embryonic development with a set of simple genes that determine how it grows, how it moves and what mate it finds "attractive". Each creature has both a mouth and a sexual organ, and has two goals in life: Eat and Mate. The varied creatures (called swimbots) compete for pellets of food and mates. Once they mate, they create a child with genes similar to both parents, with minor mutations. Over time the better swimmers, the more efficient turners and the most "attractive" swimbots survive and reproduce. The ecosystem settles into a stable cycle and natural selection ensures that there will be a few dominant competing species. It may take a few hours, but eventually the screen should be filled with higly efficient swimming and eating machines created by nothing more than a few simple rules and natural selection.
Please forgive me if this has already been posted before.
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This reminds me of "Darwinpond", which was a simple evolution program with genes and all that jazz. We had "swimmers" back in those day.
i got that and its cool. It takes a while though. Im tempted to leave it running over night to see what happens, but i dont want my computer to explode or some crap.
Man, this program is really cool!
I'm not going to get anything done at work tomorrow.
Anyone have some interesting settings that they've used?
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
I max out the Food Spread and set Food Birth Delay to 1
And I am going to let mine run all night...right now they are mostly green, and swim in short bursts. I must be so lame...I like watching them "compete for food"
I think tomorrow Ill max the food delay...efg
We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.
~ Richard Dawkins
It needs a button to speed it up, like a 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x and 5x button.
But anyway, mine's been running for a few hours and they're all like yellow earthworms... no real variations at the moment. There were a bunch of shorter orange ones, but they all died out. So, now the yellow ones are just competing with each other.
Flying Spaghetti Monster -- Great Almighty God? Or GREATEST Almighty God?
Don’t you know that penicillin was discovered, the morning after?
We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.
~ Richard Dawkins
I was very sad that my compact wormy guys were super efficient swimmers but seemed to have no way of turning by more than a couple of degrees. When they could see the food, their turning radius was such that they'd barely turn at all before getting out of range of being able to see the food.
They'd encounter food solely by virtue of being able to cover the entire length of the pool before being in dire need of food. Poor little wormy guys.
-Triften
How about this:
Who can create the largest population? And what were the settings you did it on?
I made it to 2000 even today.
FBD: 1
FBSR: 4598
FBES: 100
SHT: Set this to 100, then when the population was at about 1k I set it to 1. It causes the population to sky rocket very quickly, followed by an even faster crash.
SEO: 0.2
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
Ok, I've tried this technique a couple times, and I think that the pool maxes out at exactly 2000 swimbots, so much for that competition. I suppose we could setup a competition for the highest sustained population (no fluctuations larger than 50). Of course the problem with this is that it takes quite a while for everything to reach equilibria.
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan