So I get bored easily and seeing I have no life to speak of I end up writing pointless programs that demonstrate arbitrary points of evolutionary theory that only people who don’t understand it actually argue with in the first place. The first program I wrote, which attempted to show how mutation and natural selection could make a “bug” better suited to its environment, garnered a number of great comments as well as some helpful constructive criticism and as such my initial plan was to go back and rewrite that program taking those issues into account. However I ended up doing away with that idea and starting completely from scratch.

The most common complaint about the original program was that it took too long to run. Even sped up to run at around a generation a second it could still take a number of minutes to get anything approaching a definitive result. As such when I started writing this new program I put considerable thought into this issue and, well how can I put this, decided to ignore it completely. This new program is, I am afraid to say, a good bit slower than the last one. In fact it can at times take several hours to run, which believe me makes bug testing it a real pain. On top of that both selection and reproduction work differently in this program and as such there is no simulated predation or mating in this one. Yes people that’s right. I have written a sequel that is vastly longer than the original and which contains no sex or violence. Clearly I must be mad!

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Ok firstly, seriously people am I the only person posting on this blog at the moment? I mean one more post and the entire first page will be nothing but posts from me and I’m pretty sure our readers don’t want to just be hearing from me all the time.

Secondly I have to acknowledge that there is a very good chance, judging from the reactions of people I know, that no one else is going to find this as remotely cool, interesting or hypnotic as I do. I completely expect that many of the comments on this one will be along the lines of “erm ok then” or the ever popular “WTF!”

So a while back, inspired by similar things from the likes of CDK007 and Thunderf00t, I decided to try and write a little program that would visually demonstrate the principles of evolution by natural selection. I know, my life really is that exciting. I decided to create a little population of computerised bugs and by simply applying selection pressure to them show how they could evolve over the generations to be better suited to their environment. The main difference, between my program and those of the afore mentioned YouTubers, is that I wanted to make my version interactive so that people could play around with it to their hearts content. With that in mind I made a whole host of changes to the original version of the program I had written before so that it is now possible to play around with a number of different selection pressures and change the environment in which the bugs live at will. Finally I made the decision to share it with the rabid horde here at the League of Reason. So with no further ado, and with some trepidation, I give you:

Bug Evolver 2.0

For more details of exactly what is going on in this program check below the fold.

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