Evolve-o-Matic

DUNLPFA	TLNOQFI	YGSKWWJ	SSUJ	YMPXVXFR	CYNXFEU
PGTL	RMGGE	ECIUHNOFY	RCEQFWZ	NRULNQ	VAHKVLBW
ZYRFDESK	JFNFP	XZXQD	VBRJT	XGVXMK	HHQFLPVY
MGBUNZ	FQDKXLDM	DCUVGH	YXZXD	WTGIGY	LFHMM
BZWZCC	KRNYQQ	IPJTSQU	TVMLULWY	CZVD	XPUZ
CYEBTPXS	VVJKDC	AZZHV	BUSJM	HCQIFTE	VVGZYG

Rows: Columns: Start:

The Evolve-O-Matic demonstrates some principles of evolution. The table above contains a bunch of gibberish words. Click the "word" that looks most like a real word. The Evolve-O-Matic will then display a new page of words which are mutated versions of the word you selected. Mutations are shown in uppercase.

With the Evolve-O-Matic, you are the selecting force. In real evolution, various natural forces do the selecting. Another way to look at it is that the organism themselves do the selecting, by either dying before they reproduce, or reproducing before they die.

You can set the table size using Rows and Columns. The default 6 by 6 is generally pretty good, but if you're trying for a really long word, you might want to set the number of columns lower, and rows higher.

Click Restart to start over. Type something in Start the click Restart to restart from a word of your choice. Even though real evolution doesn't have goals, it can be fun to see how long it takes to "Evolve" an "ape" into a "man.",

Hints and tips: As to might expect, it takes a lot less time to evolve a short word than a long word. You can probably get a good 3 or 4 letter word in under a dozen generations. A 6 or 7 letter word might take 30 or 40 generations. The Evolve-O-Matic will not generate words longer than 12 letters.

The amount of information in the human genome is roughly equal to a word a billion letters long, or about 1 gigabyte (depending on exactly how you want to encode it). This amount of data would require a moderate amount of data compression (less than 2:1) to fit on a single CD-ROM.

See my parable The Watchmaker for another view of evolution.