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From: Martyn.Amos@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Martyn Amos)
Subject: Re: Genetic Game
Message-ID: <1994Nov15.181244.26398@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>
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Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 18:12:44 GMT
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In article <shea.1111.000C22AE@marcam.com> shea@marcam.com (Tim Shea) writes:
>There was a great example of a simple genetic programming
>exercise in the Scientific American "Computer Recreations"
>column approximately 5-7 years ago. Sorry, I looked for
>the isse but couldn't find it. But the idea is pretty simple:
>
>Basically you have a rectangular surface onto which falls a
>random rain of food particles. Small bugs crawl around
>on the surface eating the food. Each bug contains genes
>which controll its pattern of movement. These genes 
>are represented as a simple array of "movement primitives"
>(i.e. letters or something) which are consulted each time 
>a bug moves. So for example the genes for a particular bug 
>might have a lot of "turn right" symbols in it, in which case
>that bug will tend to twirl in clockwise circles. (This type 
>of bug is typically an evolutionary goner, since  it tends
>to exhaust its local food supply quickly and starve.)
>
>When reproducing, a small subset of bugs mutate their genetic 
>structure randomly, which means that some new offspring will 
>exhibit slightly different search "strategies" than their parents.
>(An interesting excercise is to vary the rate of mutation.)
>
>Bugs generally start off moving randomly. They gradually
>evolve into more organized searchers. So this is a nice,
>simple demonstration of natural selection that kids at the
>high-school level can build.

I produced (yet another) implementation of a system very similar to this
as part of my undergraduate degree. It's written in C, and is reasonably
portable. If I get enough requests I can make it available either through
ENCORE or the GEARS ftp archive.

Martyn
-- 
Martyn Amos = martyn@dcs.warwick.ac.uk =  Parallel Computation Group,
=-=-=-=-=-= = martyn@alife.santafe.edu =  Department of Computer Science,
-=-=-=-=-=- =   (Santa Fe Institute)   =  University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
------------         http://www.csv.warwick.ac.uk/~csras/        ------------
