Anima
This application simulates an environment that supports evolving single-celled organisms I call Animas.
These organisms can move around the environment, eat, and reproduce.
They reproduce by asexually by cloning themselves, but there is some chance for mutations so the offspring can evolve.
Each anima has a number of properties which determine their behavior such as metabolism, how much they eat, lifespan, ideal temperature, and how often they like to move.
The environment they live in is a 2 dimensional grid and has a constant amount of nutrients flowing up from below.
The nutrients flow at a steady rate and can be depleated if an anima eats too much.
Dark areas of the environment contain more nutrients while lighter areas contain less.
The environment will always maintain a population of at least 10 and not more than 10,000 animas.
There may be more than one anima at each location but they will deplete the resources faster.
You can change the following environment variables.
- Tempurature: The animas will adapt to slight temperature changes but large changes may kill them all.
- Mutation Rate: Determines the percentage of mutations during reproduction.
- Nutrient Rate: Determines how fast nutrients are replenished in the environment.
Sometimes it may take a while to get the population going.
A good strategy is to hike up the nutrient rate to get it going and then throttle it back to see how the animas react.
You can also try playing with the temperature to see how long it takes them to adapt.
Play around with the mutation rate to see how it affects diversity.
You can click in the grid and see info about that location and the animas at that location.
The information will show up in the Java console (In Firefox and IE under the Tools menu).
Start the app by clicking the button below.
If you don't see a button you probably don't have Java Runtime Envinronment (JRE) installed (you need version 1.5 or later).
|
