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[Spacefaye]

It's a computer simulation where hundreds of virtual organisms evolve swimming skills. These organisms are called "swimbots". You can set mate preference criteria and thus influence what the swimbots consider as attractive qualities in potential mates. The most attractive swimbots get chosen most often to have little babies, and so their genetic building blocks propogate to future generations. Eventually, swimbots get better at pursuing each other, competing for food, and becoming babes to other swimbots. Local gene pools emerge which compete for sex and food (for energy to have more sex). Eventually a dominant sub-population takes over.

Sometimes, everyone just dies. That's not a bug. That's nature! If you want, you can move swimbots and food around to help your favorite critters survive.

Gene Pool is best appreciated as a virtual Darwinian aquarium in which you initiate a primordial soup, and then occasionally check up on what Virtual Mother Nature is up to - about every fifteen minutes (or every few days, if you are interested in long-term evolutionary experiments!).

Speaking of experiments, In Gene Pool you can "Tweak Ecology", which means that you can change food and energy settings. Question: what happens when swimbots give (ALL) of their energy to their offspring when they mate? Here's a hint: They die. But what does this mean for evolution in the long term? Try it and find out.

http://www.swimbots.com/

[pisskop]

neat

[rabidgam3r]

neat-o

[Ozyton]

neat-y

[Fikes]

C-c-c-combo breaker.

Sites that have a download that easy to get always worry me. Has anyone actually installed it?

[flame99]

C-c-c-combo breaker.

Sites that have a download that easy to get always worry me. Has anyone actually installed it?

May regret this, but installing now.

Kasperskys, don't fail me!


EDIT: It would appear to be the real deal. Just...Much simpler than I expected. Still cool, though.

[rabidgam3r]

I installed it.
Ended up with a pool of squid-hands. Actually looked like fluently animated grasping hands. Weiiiiird.

[PTTG??]

I wish that there was a base metabolic cost. As it is, the simulation gradually fills up with single-segment mutants that can't move, and therefore don't need to eat.

[flame99]

This is really cool, actually. I think I'm going to start documenting my experiments with this.

I've just generated a world with the "neighborhoods" setting, with sexual preference set to hyper, but otherwise default settings. Two main initial groups: Cyan and purple creatures with several "arms" radiating from a central point, which moves by writhing said arms (Hereby called fronds), and black and red creatures with several branching arms which move by thrashing chaotically. The most efficient seem to either use a method similar to a breaststroke, or one which involves curling into a single point before quickly and violently firing themselves forwards and unwinding. The most efficient simply sways a bit, causing it to move forward fairly quickly. However, it likely won't breed, since it doesn't actually move much.

[WillowLuman]

Interesting. I'll leave it running with default settings for a while to see what happens.

[pisskop]

hunh.  Ima have to try it out now then

---

Death doesnt seem to happen.

I have a herd of freaky-coordinated swimmers all chasing down the same food :\

[pisskop]

So hey, I learned that cloning splits the energy value in half, half for the original and half for the clone.  No wonder I couldnt seed an empty one with my four 'archtypes'.  Theyd almost all die out immedietely!

[IronyOwl]

Leaving it completely alone has left me with a roving horde of hideous multihued (but primarily purple)... things. I'm not even sure what to call them or how to describe how they move. Just sort of twisting around, I guess? They sure look like they're terrible at it, but not only are they the only things left, they're a creeping swarm that routinely decimates its own food supply.

[flame99]

Default settings save for sexual preference to big creatures and 100% energy to offspring.

Resulted in a handful of mostly identical creatures (With a few offspring) floating about. They actually tended to migrate around the place, eating all the food in one area, then migrating to another while the old area recovers.

Changing the settings to food growth delay = 0, food spread = 8000, food bit energy = 40, hunger threshold = 85, and energy to offspring = 53. Also, sexual preference is set to hyper. Note that the swimbots are the same ones from before. Let's see how this works out, shall we?

EDIT: The pool has more greenspots than decade old meat and the green line of the population graph is literally off the chart. Going well so far. Setting food growth delay = 25, for the sake of my laptop.

EDIT2: Watching these things starve is really macabre. They turn darker colours, begin sort of seizing, and eventually curl up before disappearing. It's sort of disturbing. On a happier note, population's exploded. It's gone from 85 to 213 already. They seem to be forming herds. Not sure why. Despite the ludicrously high food spawn rate, they've already cleared out one corner. They're beginning to expand outwards more.

EDIT3: Figured out the herd thing. They're basically massive, incestuous orgies. They're breeding at massive rates, before joining into it. It's kind of disturbing. Also means less new genes to develop. Should I begin zapping things? Anyways, ~25% already cleared of food. 302 swimbots. Blue coloration is slowly gaining a foothold, now making up a rough estimate of 3% of the population, deviating from the standard pale green. Bright green remains very rare, with only three specimens left. Though, dark blue population is beginning to drop. Also, a slight blue tinge is beginning to become prevalent in the pale greens.

[varsovie]

Is there a native Linux version on the plans?