Darwinian Theory of Evolution along with multiple discoveries in several disciplines like genetics have completely changed the way we envision evolution, together comprising a union of ideas known as modern evolutionary synthesis.

Evolution is the process of change over a period of time of inherited traits found in a population. It is driven by several factors as follows: natural selection which is a nonrandom process by which biologic traits become more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers; genetic drift which is identified by the change in the frequency of a gene variant in a population due to random sampling; mutation which are changes in a genomic sequence; gene flow, which is the incorporation of genes from one population into another.

What is Evolution

Evolution is a lightweight, educational application designed to simulate the process of evolution by employing natural selection and mutations as change factors. Users get to play God by designing the environment and watching how a hundred different creatures compete to stay alive.

How does it work ?

To start off, run the executable and assign an appropriate User name; note that once a creature is created, you can not change your name. Creatures are made up of multiple components: a 32x32 array of parts; groups: the sections of a creature that move independent of each other; actions which define a movement of a group or range of groups; conditions where you specify a set of conditions that have a numeric result; behaviors: match conditions to actions to create behaviors; a list of 100 available parts, not all of them are used but a creature stores the list as part of its DNA so its children inherit the same list.

Every time a creature reproduces, its offspring will mutates to a small degree or large. The possibility of a large mutation is user defined. They will have a change in actions, conditions, and behaviors. Each creature is able to attack, defend, store and sense. These actions are visible to the user in the form of colors, that is the exterior color of a part is based on its highest stat: Red for Attack, Blue for Defense, Green for Storage, Purple for Sense. The interior color is a shade of green based on the amount of food stored in that particular cell.

Creatures are able to sense the environment and move accordingly. Behaviors match conditions and actions. If the condition is met, the action will be attempted. Each turn the creature will try the next behavior in order until it runs out of behaviors or all groups have moved.

Graphical User Interface

Evolution's GUI provides in-detailed information about creatures' progress and history. It is focused on the real time depiction of your pixel based life forms but also includes a tab based panel that allows you to track a specific creature, view stats, actively change parameters and view the log.

The DNA tab includes multiple details of a specific creature along with image. This will provide access to its parts. Clicking the track check box will track the current creature. This is also where you can modify the name of the creature.

The Stats tab will display a small statistical overview of their behavior so far.

The Control Panel is where you change food intake per cycle, mutation and reproduction parameters.

You can control the environment by adding delimiters on the screen with the help of walls as well as define new actions, conditions and behaviors for an individual creature's mutation.

Zoom in and out of the interface, run in Status Bar only mode, pause and resume cycles.

Overview

The application provides a lightweight platform for displaying how life evolves given a certain user input. The creatures taking part in the experiment are intelligent pixel based forms of life that can reproduce, mutate, sense and interact with the environment and among themselves.

Although in its infancy, Evolution is a promising project; it is designed for educational purposes and we recommend everyone to give it a try and look forward to further development.

Currently Evolution requires no installation and is Free to use!

For more information, please watch the movie that contains installation and complete features demo

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