By Robin Dowling · a year ago
I had to decide on what part of evolution I wanted to simulate. On what level of granularity.
Start at Big Bang? Base it on cellular automata, and build from there? Something else?
Both of those would be fun exercises, but I decided to start with something that would be fun to interact with in a game, where players could emphasize with the playable characters. Something different from what we know, but still close to home.
By Robin Dowling · a year ago
What's interesting about simulating evolution is it forces you to think about the philosophical questions that come with our interpretation of the world around us.
- How did the world come to be?
- How did everything start?
- What was the initial seed of life, the universe and everything?
- Was intelligent design applied somewhere to kickstart the process?
- Are the changes in evolution happening at random?
- Is there such a thing as randomness?
- Is the universe deterministic, building on the inevitable chain of events based on an initial seed? Who chose the seed?
Honestly, for thoughts on this, I recommend Stephen Wolfram's research into cellular automata.
As for the evolution simulation, it takes the stand of starting at a genesis, with a seeded randomness ensuring a deterministic evolution based on the initial seed. This provides a fully ranom evolution each time, one that can be regenerated if provided the same initial seed.
In the real world, scientists are still uncertain if we live in a deterministic universe where there is no actual randomness, only perceived complexity, or if there is an inherent radnomness. Either way, humans would never know the difference in their day to day life. But it would have immense implications for things like free will.
Organisms in the evolution simulation have free will, but this free will is based on a deterministic randomness.
By Robin Dowling · a year ago
The idea is to have the world be completely random each time it is restarted. Based on some basic rules applied to the world, all evolutions will be completely unique, and no two evolutions will be identical.
Just like waves in the ocean.
By Robin Dowling · 2 years ago
After sitting on an idea for a few years, I finally gave in and started working on a pet project—building an evolution simulation.
A constantly evolving world, brimming with some form of life.
One where observers can also jump in and control individuals of different species, affecting the outcome of the evolution.
Evolution itself has fascinated me for a long time, and the idea of simulating it in software felt like a fun mix of challenge and curiosity.
One that I couldn’t really look away from.
I was thinking of ways to get started. It seemed pretty difficult, but fun. Too much fun to not do.
There has been a lot to figure out already from a technical standpoint, and a lot to learn about physics and biology.
I’ll be sharing updates here as I make progress, explore weird edge cases, and hopefully evolve something interesting.