When you have a creature that reproduces, and this reproduction is imperfect, then you have the necessary ingredients for evolution.
This simple simulation shows evolutionary mechanics occurring in a virtual petri dish.
Each "individual" has a single gene, that determines its color and its reproduction probability. When an individual reproduces, there is a small chance that its offspring will mutate, earning a smaller or higher value of the gene.
Over time, individuals with higher reproduction probability will slowly dominate the petri dish over their slower neighbors.
Inspired by Avida-ED
I still want to improve things a little bit. Give the creatures more visual variety, and add some more audio-visual juice. Suggestions / comments / hacks welcome!
A simple yet clear way to demonstrate the mechanics of evolution.
I think the gene value reaches a optimum level around 8,9
Thank you for the comment!
Yeah, I'd say it stabilizes at around 9, rather than reaches and optimum, since there is no (explicit) evaluation going on. That is the mean when most of the population reached the maximum gene value (10), but we still have frequent mutation downwards.
If we reduced the mutation rate, I think the stable mean gene value would rise, although it would take it longer to reach "stable-ten" stage. And vice versa.
It would probably be more interesting if I added some neutral visual genes to allow us to observe non-pressure genetic drift as well.
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