Darwin Day: Good Evolution Games?
Darwin’s birthay is on February 12th, which is a Sunday. I’d kinda like to do something fun to celebrate.
I was wondering if anyone knew of any good games that feature natural selection? Video games would work if necessary (to run through a lot of iterations quickly), but I’d prefer something closer to a board game, that has a party feel.
What’s coming to mind is an activity from 10th grade biology: you get a bunch of skittles, and place them on a yellow background, and then you go through iterations of “eat the first skittle you see as fast as possible”, and then for each remaining skittle, add two more skittles of the same color. Within a few generations they’re all yellow because those were harder to see.
That framework is nice, but doesn’t really produce an interesting result. I’m trying to think of something that, over the course of an afternoon, without computer simulation, produce some interesting emergent phenomena.
Anyone have thoughts? Does anything like this already exist?
The problem with evolution-based games is that they don’t need players, that’s why you don’t see many of them (Spore doesn’t count, it’s not evolution, it’s intelligent design).
I do, however, have a favorite evolution game, if we may call it so: Gene Pool. It features a simple 2D water environment with real physics and simple swimming creatures whose phenotypes are basically multi-jointed tree-like structures, where the genotype controls the number of joints / branches and the amplitudes and frequencies of their flapping in relation to creature’s sensors.
I consider this to be an ideal evolution game: it has real physics, creatures that must perceive their environment and interact with it through physics in order to reproduce, heredity, variation, and no player input at all—except for placing walls to isolate parts of the environment, which (supposedly, I never tried that) lets you create your own little Australias.
My entire office once spent several days playing with this thing. One guy’s creatures evolved into worms that swim by writhing, mine looked like asymmetric shrimps, and the third guy evolved bird-like flappers, also asymmetric. It was amazing to watch randomly flailing creatures evolve into swimmers that actively chase food particles and mates.
I remember playing around with the precursor to it, Darwin Pond, when I was 14 or so. I was a lousy genetic engineer but I loved just watching. My favourite recording was when it started out with one red, one blue and one yellow colony and over the next 1,5 hours reds and blues were slowly improving while the yellows starved and perished until they were down to 2 swimmers; then those two suddenly bred the fastest two-legged swimmer around, and in a few minutes the entire pond was yellow, entering the normal breeding/starvation cyclic relationship with the “flora”.
Watching those critters creeps me out.
How common is this reaction?
ETA: No point clogging the thread with this discussion. Retracting.
This is pretty cool, and may actually serve the purpose (as something playing in the background on a big screen rather than an activity to engage directly in, but we can find other things to do in the meantime)
Darwin loved backgammon.
You could try to get the metronome synchronization thing to happen—everybody who has a metronome brings one, you put them all on a slightly unstable surface and see if they find a collective beat.
Play telephone in a circle. Each player makes up a message and whispers it to the person on her left, then she whispers what she heard to the player on her left. Keep going until a stable meme evolves.
Science is wonderful, and Darwin was not only brilliant, but was diligent and hardworking and courageous in offering a valid theory in which was bound to subject him to scathing criticism from the obvious sources.
Let’s celebrate Darwin, and every other brave and insightful scientist, but I wouldn’t celebrate natural selection as such. Natural selection itself is an alien god. As Darwin said:
Oh that would be central to the event. Don’t worry.
These aren’t really what you are looking for, but I bring them to your attention nevertheless.
Dominant Species (I have not played this but) while it is quite long, it is very highly rated.
Evo
Primordial Soup
Not a game as such, but worth a look: http://www.cambrianexplosion.com/
A dark arts suggestion: stuff the pairs of scale model animals into the ark? The laughs you’ll get about the alleged deluge will be much more effective at isolating and ridiculing the creationists out of their ideological trap than any mere example of evidence.
I don’t think that counts as dark arts (in part because I think it will would have no effect, expect perhaps to reinforce the creationists’ tribal instincts)
It’s only possible to demonstrate evolution in finely tuned environments specifically designed to show it off (like a computer program for example) so I don’t think you’ll be able to demonstrate it like that. Also Darwins contribution to the theory was minimal at best, he’s just used as a figurehead because he wrote down the status quo slightly sooner than anyone else.
Kind of merciless, just like natural selection. Only the rabbit that gets to the hole slightly sooner than the wolf lives on.
Genetic algorithms are used in practical contexts. See for example this use of genetic algorithms to make a more efficient radio antennas(pdf).
I did just learn this today (oddly enough, in the very first page of Origin of Species). [edit: I knew that there was at least one other person developing the theory concurrently, but I didn’t know that Darwin was just a few incremental steps beyond the general consensus]
Over the past few hours I’ve been discussing some ideas with others and mostly come to this conclusion. It would definitely be a hard problem, although I’d enjoy the problem enough to work at it for a while.