Life Finds a Way Out

What am I looking at?

A 1v4 game where the player earns points for zapping or tagging their opponents and loses points for getting zapped. In order to clear the room, the player has to zap/tag each opponent four times. At any given moment, the player can either move or zap/tag. They move up, down, left or right, or they can zap/tag in one of those directions. So at each moment, they have to choose 1 of 8 options.

The player's choices are determined by a gene with an encoded sequence of instructions. For example, a gene might read “Move Left – Fire Up – Move Left – Move Down – Fire Right.” The simulation program will read those instructions and have the player act accordingly until the room’s goal is satisfied or the gene runs out of instructions. Then the gene will be mutated to look for a better solution.

What do the controls do?

Chromosome length controls how many actions the Player can complete in one generation. The longer the chromosome, the more moves they make and the more time they have to solve the exercise. But each generation will take longer to run.

Under the Team section, you can decide which Player type trying the exercise. A zapper can zap opponents with a laser from afar. A tagger has to get next to the opponent to tag them.

The Begin! button will start a simulation with your chosen team and parameters. So that it doesn't take forever, the generations will evolve in the background. The most recent generation will be animated on the screen; once one animation completes, the next available generation will be animated. When the whole simulation is done, the final best solution will be animated. A movie of this animation will be available to download, in case your Players evolve something cool you want to save for posterity.

The chart to the right will show the fitness for generations where it stayed the same or increased. Each time you run an experiment, a new series of points will be added. You can right click and save "Save image as..." if you get results you want to keep.