Show HN: Richard Dawkins’ Biomorphs Implemented in JavaScript

Neat! I also liked some of the other Javascript demos on this site, like http://www.emergentmind.com/elementary-cellular-automata .

Heres's also a fun little video of vintage Dawkins showing off his program: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDxaCJmlIGo

I have fond memories of programming variants of Dawkin's Biomorphs program in my early teens. I even sent him one of my creations, to which a grad student of his replied with kind encouragement!

I vaguely remember in Dawkins' book that he said he was going to put a touch-sensitive screen near some flowers to see if any of the biomorphs would attract bees. The idea was that the biomorphs would evolve to be ever more pleasing to bees, and it would be interesting to see what patterns they took. Does anyone else recall this, or is it a figment of my imagination? I don't suppose anyone has tried this? Could be fun to try with an iPad.

Love it!

I wrote a small script that evolves them based on a scoring function, paste in your console and run evolve(1000, score)

    function evolve(numGenerations, scoringFn, stepInterval) {
      var children = document.querySelectorAll('[id*=child]'), generation = 0
      if (stepInterval == null) stepInterval = 10

      function run() {
        var i, child, ctx, data, score, winner, winningScore = -Infinity
        for (i = children.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
          child = children[i]
          ctx = child.getContext('2d')
          data = ctx.getImageData(0, 0, 318, 148)
          score = scoringFn(data)
          if (score > winningScore) {
            winningScore = score
            winner = i
          }
        }
        children[winner].click()
        if (++generation < numGenerations) setTimeout(run, stepInterval)
        // console.log(winner, winningScore)
      }

      run()
    }

    function score(imageData) {
      var i, r, g, b, rv = 0,
          data = imageData.data, l = data.length
      for (i = 0; i < l; i += 4) {
        r = 255 - data[i]
        g = 255 - data[i+1]
        b = 255 - data[i+2]
        a = data[i+3] / 255
        rv += (r + g + b) * a
      }
      return rv
    }

By the way, anyone who is new to the whole artificial life area should also take a look at Chris Adami's Avida: video [0], site [1]. Some Nature papers even came out of it, e.g. [2].

I'm going to shamelessly plug two abandonware projects of mine, being an agent-based neural network evolution sim [3] and a spatial game theory lab [4]. These might be interesting to people who like this kind of stuff.

But there's a huge amount of other stuff out there, e.g. projects like DarwinPond and prolific researchers like Martin Nowak [5].

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouF8wKxXWFQ

[1] http://avida-ed.msu.edu/

[2] http://adamilab.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reprints/2003/Len...

[3] https://github.com/taliesinb/floatworld/wiki

[4] https://github.com/taliesinb/spatial-game-theory/wiki

[5] http://www.ped.fas.harvard.edu/publications/

Intelligently designed! Congrats!

It does not take that many generations to select for traits when the diversity is already in place. This is wonderfully illustrated by these biomorphs. But when you are waiting for an innovation to appear---something not yet in the gene pool---you will have to wait a very long time. The spontaneous occurrence of innovation is exceedingly rare, and you will have to wait over Evolutionary timescales to see it happen.

Anyone else keep converging to this shape?

https://i.imgur.com/aI0zDw9.png

This is really cool. Somebody already asked for a reverse button, how about a way to playback the evolutionary history of your biomorph (animated)?

This reminds me of programming something from A. K. Dewdney's Armchair Universe on my Amiga in the late '80s. I think it originally appeared in Scientific American. It started off with bugs that just sort of juggled, but the ones that survived eventually glided around eating things.

Very cool! Can you implement a reverse button to store the last few sets? I notice that sometimes there is a mutation that shows up in all the offspring at once.

this reminds me of W. Latham

https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BE&v=AN6ngsckRZs

Are these creations manipulations of binary trees?