Natural Selection Simulation

Inspiration

Mrs. Jones' bio class involved many hands-on labs relating to evolution. We thought it would interesting to see a coded version of it.

What it does

Simulates population adaption and evolution due to environmental factors

How we built it

Programmed in javascript, it simulates the lives of a population - including death and birth. Those who survive the environmental limitations live to reproduce, and their offspring have a higher chance of being able to survive. Thus, over time, the population should either evolve to "good enough" where they survive enough to keep the population alive, or they all die and go extinct.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing the effects of different factors required a lot of tweaking so that the effect was obvious for a large change was difficult to manage.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

IT WORKS!!!! In the beginning, we had multiple problems with the implementation of food, leading to an infinite carrying capacity and killing Felix's computer. I'm extremely proud of our group for being able to stick through the hardship and troubleshoot at 4am in the morning.

What we learned

Intuitively designing formulas modeling biological processes is a lot harder than originally imagined. For example, I likened it to DND rolls, but then balancing the effect of each stat was extremely difficult.

What's next for Natural Selection Simulation

Optimization of formulas and possibly making a slope field for population growth - especially indicating carrying capacity.

Built With

• javascript
• p5