Genetic Car Driver

You can move the camera with the arrow keys.

I was reading about Braitenberg vehicles the other day, and thought it sounded like a really neat concept and I wanted to play with it! So I whipped up a quick little simulation. And then one thing led to another, and I gave it more sensors and started trying to set how fast it can turn, and drive, and stop, etc. Until finally I realized that the car had too many stats and I was just arbitrarily picking them all.

This is a difficult problem to solve. So naturally, instead of solving it myself, I told my computer to do it for me. 

The result is a simulation of evolutionary algorithms performed on cars! Essentially, the best few cars based on a scoring function are permitted to 'breed', so the next generation will mostly resemble them. There's also a mutation chance that adds some random shifts to keep things interesting.

I like to sit and watch it! It makes pretty patterns!

Read a longer description of it here!