While learning to code, a quickly growing passion of mine was simulations, particularly those that demonstrated some kind of evolution/nature driven design.
I think the reason I liked simulating evolution so much was that it felt like I could make the computer act intelligent by optimizing itself to achieve goals that a human would not be capable of through manual design.
This is the first version of the evolution simulation that I built. Here, a number of unique organisms (colourful circles) with differing genotypes move around a square collecting food (smaller grey circles) to gain "energy". When an organism has gained enough energy they will use that energy to reproduce, creating another organism (a child) with very similar (slightly mutated) genotypes. In theory, over time organisms with more favourable genotypes should evolve and dominate the simulation through natural selection.
The genotype of a given organism consists of 3 values R G and B, each numbers between 0 and 1. The phenotype (observable expression of genotype) was two-fold. Firstly, the colour of the organism is a direct mapping of the RGB values to red, green and blue respectively. Secondly, and the purpose of this simulation, was that the RGB values each determined a particular attribute about the organism. Organisms also passively lose energy over time to encourage food consumption. The total sum of R,G,B also determines how fast energy is consumed, thus encouraging organisms to find an optimal balance between the the attributes.
As framework-less web was the only stack I knew at the time, this simulation was build using raw HTML/CSS/JS using the Canvas element to render graphics.
Over the next few years I totally rewrote and improved the program three more times as I got better at programming. The most recent version (v4) is significantly more advanced and I intend to create more versions in the future. Once I add the other versions to this website I'll link them here.
Turns out rewriting your own software from scratch with better abstractions and more advanced features is actually kinda cool. Would recommend. Maybe I will write about this one day.