Gene Pool

For all the Darwinists (is that a word?) out there, here is a way to watch natural slection and evolution in front of your eyes! Through Gene Pool (www.swimbots.com) you can watch little swimbots seeking food and mates.

They seek mates based on colour, size and distribution of body pieces - although you can control their preferences to see what effect this has on the population. The resulting offspring have half of each parents' DNA.

They swim using a bit of pendulum based physics, so some are very awkward swimmers, some can't swim at all and some are really good but have bad directional movement.

I've cultured a few different pools and it is interesting to see a dominant species emerge each time (usually they are the better direcitonal swimmers) who out-live the others. You can put barriers in place to create mini populations iwhtin the one pool. Although sometimes they all die out.

One of the 'pond' choices you are given is where the swimbots are phenotypically the same, but when they begin mating you start to see some different shapes and colours emerging.

Darwin aside, it is a little bit fun playing God. You can pick up swimbots and food pieces and move them around. You can help them mate with each other by putting them on top of each other (although one has to be 'in love' with the other), you can clone them and you can kill them. The power! The smiting! Although there's no creative control, so yet again intelligent design loses out (oh the tragedy).

PS - Blogger is being an arse and not letting me use the spell checker or other tools so apologies for any dodginess. Gah! Not even letting me preview!