Topics › Evolution

Friday, 11th November 2011

Cell evolution game - basic interface

Today I started to make a game that I've been thinking about for a quite a while now (I mention here). The general idea is that you play as a single-celled microbe which evolves ever more complex metabolic and regulatory systems as it moves to ever more challenging environments. It's related to my cell simulation, but you get to choose how the cell evolves (so it's not really evolution).

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Saturday, 16th April 2011

Sex in Sugarscape

Since the last time I wrote about Sugarscape, I've made a bit of progress. The biggest improvement is the introduction of sexual reproduction. I can therefore recapitulate more of the results of the original simulation, and test a number evolutionary ideas.

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Thursday, 22nd April 2010

Solar system evolution

After running my solar system simulation several times I was interested to see how robust the system was. By this I mean that despite the fact that the particles start off randomly distributed, the progress of the simulation is quite similar each time. The details weren't exactly the same each times, but in general, a star formed at the centre of the universe at about the same time and ended up with a few satellites, while several particles were sent flying off into space.

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Wednesday, 10th February 2010

Project:

Cell Simulation

A simulation of single celled organisms and their evolution with the focus on metabolic and regulatory pathways.

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Tuesday, 3rd November 2009

Project:

Heterocyst Simulation

An old simulation of a type of cyanobacterium and its evolution, which was originally written in QBASIC. Includes analysis of the results from this simulation

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Friday, 16th October 2009

Evolving ant behaviour

Example of simple ant behaviour - spiralling

I've been thinking for a while about how to program ant behaviour in my simulation. The difficulty is that even relatively simple behaviours (such as following a pheromone trail) are difficult to code as a behaviour at the agent (or ant) level. While I probably could come with a reasonable behaviour if I thought about it and tested various parameters, it seems a lot simpler to evolve a suitable behaviour. After all, that’s what ants did.

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Thursday, 17th September 2009

Project:

Evolving Images

A genetic algorithm that uses overlapping transparent circles to approximate an image. Includes analysis of the effect of altering mutation rate and population size.

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