It looks fun, but what's the parameter used to determine when a new car is generated?
Every contraption I've seen so far seems to "survive" for a mere couple of seconds - IMHO the stopping parameter should be "hasn't moved for n seconds", whereas it seems to currently be pretty much random.
-f0dder
It seems to progressively last longer depending on how the previous generation scored. It seems the number in parentheses is the "goal" score. If the motorcycle reaches that score, it will consider it a success and generate a new one. At first the goal is really small because it's so random that it's probably not very helpful to allow one to go a long distance. That is, in the beginning, quantity is much more important than quality to help narrow down the mutations. I've charted what I think the UI represents in a screenshot:
Darwinism + geneticism + two-wheeled vehicles = ... awesomeness.The graph at the top appears to be as follows: The red line appears to be the goal (target) score and the black line appears to be the average score for that generation. Depending on how well each generation does, the goal score goes up or down to help improve each iteration. If no motorcycles reach (abot 50% of the) goal score, it will be lower next time so that it can iterate through more mutations faster.
EDIT: The above is all just a guess based on my observations. I could be wrong about any or all of it.
I was playing with this last weekend. I tried three times, for at least 8-10 hours each, and never was able to evolve something that could get past around 213.
-CWuestefeld
I've had it running for about 20 minutes and I've already beat that. I wish it would display the best score somewhere on the UI...
Oh damn, so what's the point of that? There's a lot of potential for a "game" like this to become more competitive: one challenge, who can breed the best machine to stay the course?
-timns
Yeah, that would be awesome. I've had similar ideas while watching this thing go for a while.