
Mount Improbable: Play With Evolution - gwern
http://www.mountimprobable.com/
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cbebdhhd
I always thought this* was a much better demonstration of evolution in action
because it's completely undirected by the user and quickly converges to fit
solutions from obvious randomness.

* [http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/](http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/)

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jalami
I had this running in the background for hours one day. They got pretty good.

He's also got one for biped walkers that's fun to play with.
[http://rednuht.org/genetic_walkers/](http://rednuht.org/genetic_walkers/)

~~~
clayrichardson
Playing around with the wheel friction and letting it run for days was
interesting:
[https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/cawr...](https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/cawro.js#L293)

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comex
Works well in Chrome, but gets bog slow in Safari (10 beta). Instruments shows
that it spends an enormous amount of time in memcpy copying IOSurface data
around; I wonder why it is happening on the CPU rather than the GPU. But it
may not be entirely Safari's fault: it appears that every single organism
first gets drawn to a canvas the size of the entire screen (as opposed to the
size necessary for the organism), then that canvas gets drawImage'd to the
main canvas. That's an enormous number of wasted pixels. Also, this seems to
happen fresh every frame: I don't know why they're using an intermediate image
in the first place, but it's not for caching.

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colordrops
The title was incomprehensible until reading the post. I was wondering what a
"Climb Mount" was.

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soong
"Climbing Mount Improbable"[1] is the title of a book by Richard Dawkins.
Haven't read it yet, but I can absolutely recommend "The Greatest Show on
Earth"[2].

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climbing_Mount_Improbable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climbing_Mount_Improbable)

[2][https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-
Evolutio...](https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-
Evolution/dp/055277524X)

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zitterbewegung
This is really neat and they are generating the book covers based on the
computer programs. Well done demo of the software.

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AlphaWeaver
More mobile friendly than I expected!

