I worked on Adobe’s Flash Player team at that time and I remember using your Flash movie as a test case. :)

Wow, thank you for sharing this. Means a lot

Do you have some examples of results when running this for a few days?

Or perhaps, 20 years? ;-)

Or another civilization wrote it a few, billion years ago. We might see the results fly by our planet this week.

On Firefox here, the "Save Local Population" option seems to crash. Any idea why that might be happening? (Amazing site btw - every time it pops up I end up spending much too long with it).

Where do you see the "Save Local Population" option? When you say it "seems to crash", do you mean Firefox or the Flash animation?

What would be the consequences of adding a hitbox on the structure (or springs?) as well, as opposed to having it only on the load?

As internet distractions go, the original was one of the most memorable I ever came across. A friend and I used to leave them running over lunch and see who was winning when we got back. Thanks for the fun :-)

I remember running this in the background any time I was in the computer lab at school. Thanks for making this back in the day :).

There were a few genetic algorithm "polygons approximate picture" pages back in that era as well.

Thanks for writing this all those years ago. It made for a fun demonstration when I was learning genetic algos in college.