Darwin Pond

One of the type of games I like is Life Games, where life is simulated on screen. I haven't found my ideal life game yet, but I keep returning to this one, Darwin Pond. The creatures are called swimmers that are, well, swimming in a pool. They can have one or several limbs to swim with, can be of various colors, and do just the two basic behaviors of like: eat and have sex. Oh if our lives can be like that. No don't think this is x-rated! They... well... kiss and whamo, kids are born. But it seems to take a lot out of them and are almost always hungry afterwards. One interesting thing is that one can actually kill another by doing this, 'starving' the other. Each time new life is born, there is chance of genetic mutation. The theory of evolution is very much exploited. Survive or die. You can set up however you like or start out with one of the predefined setups with a large number of random swimmers. The common one has all the food and swimmers in the middle, called The Garden of Eden. Let it run for a few hours and see what happens. You can save it and let it run later, modify the genes, and save specific swimmers.

I recently done this. After a while, there were very little food left and there was mass loss of live. A country of green 1-limbers were on the top-left and on the bottom-right some 1-limbed blues. They grew, the large amount of food growth plummeted, and things evened out. Then the blues started overtaking the greens. There was also migrations as the bulk of swimmers changed locations from time to time. Recently some more variety of colors started to appear, but all still have one limb.

Be sure to read the manual!

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