Mount Improbable: Play With Evolution

http://www.mountimprobable.com/

by gwern • 10 years ago

61 13 10 years ago

This is really neat and they are generating the book covers based on the computer programs. Well done demo of the software.

AlphaWeaver• 10 years ago

More mobile friendly than I expected!

colordrops• 10 years ago

The title was incomprehensible until reading the post. I was wondering what a "Climb Mount" was.

dmix• 10 years ago

I only clicked the article to understand the title. Not unhappy that I chose to do so.

jacquesm• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climbing_Mount_Improbable

soong• 10 years ago

"Climbing Mount Improbable"[1] is the title of a book by Richard Dawkins. Haven't read it yet, but I can absolutely recommend "The Greatest Show on Earth"[2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climbing_Mount_Improbable

[2]https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolutio...

cbebdhhd• 10 years ago

I always thought this* was a much better demonstration of evolution in action because it's completely undirected by the user and quickly converges to fit solutions from obvious randomness.

* http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/

schoen• 10 years ago

Fascinating!

hyperpallium• 10 years ago

Runs much better than I'd've expected on mobile (after the pack clears out).

jalami• 10 years ago

I had this running in the background for hours one day. They got pretty good.

He's also got one for biped walkers that's fun to play with. http://rednuht.org/genetic_walkers/

clayrichardson• 10 years ago

Playing around with the wheel friction and letting it run for days was interesting: https://github.com/red42/HTML5_Genetic_Cars/blob/master/cawr...

PepeGomez• 10 years ago

Framsticks are good, but the UI is buggy.

comex• 10 years ago

Works well in Chrome, but gets bog slow in Safari (10 beta). Instruments shows that it spends an enormous amount of time in memcpy copying IOSurface data around; I wonder why it is happening on the CPU rather than the GPU. But it may not be entirely Safari's fault: it appears that every single organism first gets drawn to a canvas the size of the entire screen (as opposed to the size necessary for the organism), then that canvas gets drawImage'd to the main canvas. That's an enormous number of wasted pixels. Also, this seems to happen fresh every frame: I don't know why they're using an intermediate image in the first place, but it's not for caching.

Mount Improbable: Play With Evolution

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