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Description
I've been toying around with a program called Kandid lately. It's a fractal art type thing, only with a twist - it uses evolution to do make pictures. It generates pictures mathematically and will display a number of them to the screen at once (small, of course). You select ones you want to keep and then you can throw back the rest and hope for better results by regenerating more pictures. It keeps track of each picture with a "chromosome" file. Once you have a few that you like, you then select one that is your favorite. Using that one as the master as well as the others, you then "sexually reproduce" more pictures. It's a fascinating program because sometimes new generations of pictures will look nearly identical to those of several generations ago, just like real reproduction. Each time you usually get more and more complex pictures, and every now and then you get a surprise that looks nothing like anything you bred it from (just like real genetics too!). They thought of everything: it includes variables for the rate of crossing over and mutation too, which you can change, of course. In this pictoral evolution, instead of nature selecting what shall survive, the user is the selector as you can keep new pictures and throw out ones you kept from before. This evolution also is 100% dogma-free, so people from any background or viewpoint can enjoy it.

You can save sets of pictures as a population file where it stores all of the chromosomes as well as a collection of each picture in the population. This is what one looks like.

Description
I've been toying around with a program called Kandid lately. It's a fractal art type thing, only with a twist - it uses evolution to do make pictures. It generates pictures mathematically and will display a number of them to the screen at once (small, of course). You select ones you want to keep and then you can throw back the rest and hope for better results by regenerating more pictures. It keeps track of each picture with a "chromosome" file. Once you have a few that you like, you then select one that is your favorite. Using that one as the master as well as the others, you then "sexually reproduce" more pictures. It's a fascinating program because sometimes new generations of pictures will look nearly identical to those of several generations ago, just like real reproduction. Each time you usually get more and more complex pictures, and every now and then you get a surprise that looks nothing like anything you bred it from (just like real genetics too!). They thought of everything: it includes variables for the rate of crossing over and mutation too, which you can change, of course. In this pictoral evolution, instead of nature selecting what shall survive, the user is the selector as you can keep new pictures and throw out ones you kept from before. This evolution also is 100% dogma-free, so people from any background or viewpoint can enjoy it.

You can save sets of pictures as a population file where it stores all of the chromosomes as well as a collection of each picture in the population. This is what one looks like.