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Show HN: Evolution Chamber

evolution.hackmit.org

30 pointsanishathalye11 comments

I love it, but the server seems overloaded. Because it reacts so slowly it's a bit hard to tell what's going on. What does the "Progress" stat represent, exactly?

Yep... a couple of people on the HackMIT organizing team built this in the last 18 hours at a hackathon, and the code... isn't the most efficient. Sorry about that.

The "progress" stat represents the progress on the current generation. Once we have enough user votes to infer the fitness of individuals in the current generation, we can perform selection and mutation to produce the next generation.

Related (and cooler, no offense:) http://boxcar2d.com/

http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/

Is it the same ?

From that very page: "Loosely based on BoxCar2D, but written from scratch, only using the same physics engine"

I asked because I have a "Get flashplayer" icon on boxcar2d.com. I'm on Debian.

Seems to require the ancient Flash plugin, so I can't even see it. Not cooler.

Research has shown that making a selection between a limited set of options a large number of times is very exhausting for the brain. So I don't think this is really a good solution to any problem. But it is interesting, nonetheless.

A better idea could be to present these options while the subject's brain is being scanned using some neuro-imaging technique, and based on these signals let the system evolve.

If you enjoy this logo-evolution idea, you'd probably also enjoy Picbreeder (http://picbreeder.org/) which allows you to breed pictures (generally, not only restricted to a particular logo) represented by neural networks, through an evolutionary algorithm.

How can I create my own evolution? It started on generation 90 for me and already looked good. Is it bugged?

Everyone works on evolving the same population together. We built this in a very short period, and so there's no support for evolving your own population yet (unless you want to deploy your own version of the script).

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