Nedd some (Basic) programming ideas

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Many months ago, I got an idea for a program to write in Visual Basic 4.0 (sorry, best version I legally own). Now that I have .00001% more free time than I did back then, I want to get started on it. But I have no idea where to begin.

What I want it to do is model evolution on a small scale. I should be able to input a certain type of creature with various attributes, various conditions under which it lives, and some way for it to nourish itself and reproduce. Then I just want to let it run in thousands of iterations and see how its offspring might evolve as conditions randomly change.

One problem is how to display the results. VB isn’t very robust as far as graphics are concerned, but maybe I can just see a report of sorts on how many species, how many extinctions, etc.

Another problem is space. For any type of real-world modeling I would need millions of critters that have millions of attributes. Limited RAM becomes a problem.

Ideas?

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Oh, and the first word of the OP is “Need.” Let’s leave Nedd out of this.

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The Yahoo directory has a section on “Artificial Life” that might give some ideas. Lots of those sites seem to have running programs, some with source, maybe even VB.

Another thought is Lparser, which grows more-or-less organic-looking 3D figures from a list of simple rules. It’s free, and you can download the source code. (It’s in C, IIRC, but there are free compilers around so you could make the engine into a DLL that VB might be able to call.) It would be quite a bit of work, but you could make it extract features (e.g. size, proportions, and so on) as the object grows, and use those to drive the natural selection.

Good luck, and let us know if you come up with anything interesting.