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Comment by aarongough | Hacker News Reader

While going through my old files today I have found 3 already!

- A JavaScript framework: Like jQuery wasn't good enough?

- A client-side search engine: Used AJAX calls to crawl a website and return results... Can you say slooow? Yuck.

- Hoppy: A simple little program that creates several new versions of itself, with names generated by a markov chain, then runs those new versions after a time delay. I never inflicted this upon anyone else, but trying to shut it down without re-booting was hell!

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mine was something similar to hoppy.What I basically tried to do was write a ruby script that generated newer ruby scripts.And what did all these ruby scripts do?they scaned the long long equation and then try to put in different values in it and solve them for one variable. All this was so random and vague that I had to abandon it after about 66 minutes into it.

I made a Python script that copied itself and launched the copies (It had the ability to mutate too though by randomly changing the copies). I thought eventually it would evolve into a sentient being. But it would just tie up all my resources and freeze the computer.

One time something interesting happened though. I noticed the latest copies had commented out the mutation part of the code. They had "evolved" to not mutate. I'm guessing that was the best strategy to make viable offspring.

My take away lesson was that mutation has to come from the environment for early life forms to advance.

That's exactly what happened when procariotes evolved to eucariotes and dropped RNA in favour of DNA for storing genetic information which is much more stable so mutatuons are much more rare (our body still uses RNA just not for genetic information)

Easy, just use "import evolution".

But really, the source code of that would be really cool to see.

I'd love to see that source-code.

Come on dude that must have been cool.My opinion sell the story at Hollywood they need just such a thing to stitch together another Computer-brings-doomsday movie. I don't care how big budgeted these movies are but they always are a good laugh.

I just remember that an hour or so after I left Hoppy running the whole machine would freeze as Hoppy consumed all it's resources... Seemed like fun at the time, but I always was a strange child!

At least your script started out with a vaguely practical purpose in mind!

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