Cambrian explosion: genetic algorithm experiment | Hacker News Reader

Cambrian explosion: genetic algorithm experiment

cambrianexplosion.com

75 pointsaroberge24 comments

So inspiring to see god's hand at work, right in my browser. ;)

As I wrote the code, I could feel his divine influence through my fingers.

Your application is cool. But are we really going to turn this into a religious discussion? Because it's possible to be a Christian without believing that a man in the sky has personally designed each individual creature on earth. The latter is an extremist view which for some reason has become the mainstream in the US.

To be honest, the first thing I thought after playing with this for a bit is "hmm, I should show this to my religious friends".

Weirdly, it gave me a depressing feeling about the purposeless of life and an unusual feeling of sympathy and envy for people who deal with it through religious faith.

You don't need religious faith for your life to have a purpose. The only difference is you need to/get to choose a purpose, instead of having one dictated to you (which is often vague anyway).

Well, my point wasn't actually to say that normal-crazy creationist christians who believe in intelligent design not aided by evolution are frothing at the mouth insane as you seem to be implying the original point was; I hold that to be self-evident. It was actually to point out that no divine influence is necessary to posit normal well understood evolution, and this is a nice illustration thereof, and less-crazy non creationist christians aren't really that much better than those they look down their nose at for lacking theological sophistication.

Very kind of you to step in and validate my point by making with the looking down your nose at the creationists, though.

I take issue with your labeling of that particular view as extremist. Evolution guided by Gods hand is as nonsensical as the idea of each individual creature being hand crafted by God. They are both supported by an equal amount of science, I.e none, and should therefore be treated with no greater respect than any other extraordinary claim for which no evidence exists, I.e none.

I created this site, if anyone has any questions.

How are you calculating fitness?

The fitness is simply the distance traveled to the right. The DNA is made up of segment lengths, with, joint rotation, joint speed and joint offset (when the joints move relative to the other joints)

How do you figure the movement of each joint? I saw some were kind of wobbly.

Thanks for making it. Very entertaining and almost hypnotizing to watch.

The application freezes for me when I set "population size" to 5, i.e. identical to "simultaneous creatures". Seems to happen rather consistently in Chrome on windows.

Edit: Seems to be able to reproduce the issue in FF as well.

One of the coolest things I've seen on the internet recently! Show this to Richard Dawkins!

Please do continue with work on this site, I'd love to see the underlying algorithms etc. I would like to make a small donation, if you let me know how.

Awesome stuff. You should put the source somewhere :)

I was pleasantly surprised to find you can zoom in/out the canvas.

Nice. Wasn't sure if people would realize that. Unfortunately, this was a project that was abandoned after being about 80% complete due to other stuff getting in the way.

What wasn't implemented then? It seems to mostly work, besides some of the buttons not working correctly.

> this is the footer with all kinds of footer stuff on it

So your saying that it's like every other software project ever made ;)

Ha, pretty much.

Great project! I'd love to see physical attributes change over time and not just behavior though.

Pushing the "Evolve" button crashed Mobile Safari. :(

Set "render" to "wire" and try again. That helped on my iPad.

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