Scratch

Project Notes

This is my fourth attempt at an artificial life program. Artificial life is basically a man-made thing, such as a computer program, which can evolve and change and mutate. This one isn't quite as complex and doesn't have the same life-like quality for mutation, for example, as some other alife's do. However, it is really neat and can evolve to a point (meaning, they change color and whirliness but the circle never will become a square and the circles will never find a way to live for more than 9 seconds, etc.). Also, the evolution speed is dramatically increased from what would be normal for "real" life because otherwise it wouldn't be any fun to watch. :) Because, seriously, watching circles change size and color by imperceptible increments would leave everybody bored. And, something I just noticed, the circle is actually influenced by what it used to be: the direction it was pointing.


What it does: The circles have a randomized setpoint, and from there evolve and change. They evolve in terms of size, color, motion (steps and angle change) and whirliness. Download the program and check it out for a much more indepth (and probably confusing) understanding of what it does.


Differences from previous versions: first the new born sprites become identical copies of their parent before changing the values by the changed global variable. This making of an identical copy is by using variables that track what each sprite is. This should be equivilant to copying a sprite and changing the copy, which was one of the problems I had originally.


In a future version, I may make more "populations" of four or five sprites that will evolve separately from other populations. However, because there isn't a variable setting to make variables 'semi-local' so that they're usable for a set of sprites, but when you copy those sprites to make a new set of sprites, the variables become new variables (kind of like local sprite variables when you copy a sprite, only for a set of sprites). This wouldn't be a problem if there was a copy sprite block, but unfortunately there isn't one.


Wow, if you've read all this...I'm impressed at your patience. :) Hope it made sense if you did end up reading all this!