[hrothgar]

I ran into the following this morning
http://www.frams.alife.pl/index.html

This software package provides a testbed for evolutionary simulations...

The developers created a general model that specifies different types of actions taken by living organisms (locomotion, detecting food, consuming food, reproduction, etc). Players can then "seed" the environment with different amounts of food, choosing terrain, setting end-of-life parameters, establishing rules governing mutations, and the like. You then let a batch of protocreatures loose and watch see if anything interesting evolves.

The environment isn't simple. I've been reading this for a while. I'm not even close to running any kind of complicated simulations. None-the-less, the software looks interesting. If nothing else, it provides some interesting examples how relatively complex things can evolve out from simple antecedents...

[pigpenz]

interesting to run on a whole bunch of machines and just change a parameter at a time to see where we end up.....survival of the fittest