Posted by: Psycasm
Posted on: Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 3:22 am CDT
Also here:
http://www.ventrella.com/Darwin/darwin.html
That's a programme called 'Darwin's Pond'. Essentially you start out with x number 'wrigglers' and x amount of food. They eat, they procreate, more wrigglers appear. A certain number of 'genes' get randomly manipulated (e.g. how many legs/tails they have, how fast they grow, the energy cost of movement or sex) and they independently evolve into the most efficient wriggler for their environment. Also, they can randomly change colour for sexual selection. So if you're a red wriggler and some other wriggler finds that sexy, you get selected for... etc
There's also http://swimbots.com/ - this is a bit more complicated, but significantly more powerful. You can really tweak the genes of individuals swimmers, and it kind of starts at the other end of the spectrum - a whole pool of random little freaks that turn into efficient little organisms...
Perhaps you should give the students 30 mins to try and design the most efficient swimmer on it; and compare and see what 'evolution' can achieve in the same time?