Artificial Life

Mooncoder

In-app purchases

About this app

This app lets you play with simple simulated creatures and their evolution. It features a few genetic representations ("languages"), where each symbol in a genotype defines some characteristic of a creature (a "phenotype"). Each genetic representation has its own methods of mutation (modifying small parts of a genotype) and crossover (exchanging genes of two parents to produce an offspring).

The performance of each creature is evaluated in terms of speed on land, speed in water, and height of its center of mass. These criteria can be set as fitness. Since you have mutation and crossover available to change genotypes randomly, you can run an evolutionary process and see how fitness in the population increases.

You can also guide evolution according to your preferences by making creatures you like reproduce and generate their random variations.

If you understand a genetic language, you can even edit genes manually by deleting and adding genetic symbols, and this way build a creature you want or improve an existing one.

The app features some quests to help you familiarize with genetic languages and the properties of evolution such as convergence, diversity, selection pressure, the influence of mutation rate, or the population size. Advanced users can even try their own formulas for fitness, for example to maximize both height and speed simultaneously, or to add even more criteria.

Some demonstrations are included as well that show the concepts of directed (external fitness) and undirected (internal fitness) evolution, mutation, swarming, and communication.

This app is based on the Framsticks simulator. You can learn more at http://www.framsticks.com/

Ratings and reviews

Developer responded to my review bit I didnt leave one yet? I uninstalled to organize if that matters, but it's a cool little program. You can start evolving critters in their own save files and feed them and scoot them around the lightly customizable playground with water and slopes etc. They grow some arms and you can edit the actual genetic code which is awesome. I didnt go long enough to see any advanced movement or anything, but the potential is impressive. Runs well too.

I love this game, I hope it gets more updates and gets popular!

Hey what time will the next update come like a UI upgrade in October?

What’s new

• in the default "Move" tracking camera mode, the abrupt camera jump to target is prevented when the target (tracked selection) is changed before the ongoing change animation finishes
• improvements in the UI
• more robust handling of margin (safe area, display cutout) changes