I’m phrasing it as though they are looking at a light, because that’s what I’m doing—experimenting with implementing vision in an artificial life system.

There’s a factoid floating around that evolution cannot explain the eye. It’s based on a phrase written by Darwin. He had said that it is difficult to believe that something as complicated and well-constructed as the human eye could have come about by evolution. It was a rhetorical device. In the very next paragraph, Darwin lays out how evolution could produce an eye, or set of eyes, or whatever the given creature might happen to need.
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So, here’s the game, implemented in game.java. A certain number of cycles is chosen, between a minimum amount, 10 at the moment, and a maximum, 50. Then a coin is flipped that determines whether the light is on or off for this round. One port will, when called, set b to 1 if the light is on, and -1 if it’s off. So far so good. This is enough for the figures to have the simplest eye imaginable. They can detect whether or not the light is on, something that even single cells are capable of. Next, we attempt to get them to react to whether or not the light is on, again, something that some of the simplest life forms can do.
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Their first task was easy. Can the digital organisms I wrote, called “figures,” learn to call a good command and avoid a bad one?

My first job was easy. It only took 6 lines of code. Each digital creature, each “figure,” has a certain amount of energy.

Figure.energy = 12,168;

Each time a figure has a turn, (when they execute one command,) the energy level drops.

Energy=energy-1;

When a figure is out of energy, it dies. It is completely deleted from the system, leaving behind it’s children, if it had any.

If (figure.energy

It’s about time I tried using my artificial life as an artificial intelligence. It’s been the goal since day one. Before I could do that, I had to come up with the algorithm in the first place, and then make sure that the figures could actually evolve. To evolve, they need to change, and some of those changes should help them survive and reproduce, passing on their successful tricks to their offspring.
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