Evolving Creatures for Mobile Phones

Welcome to the webpage for my Final Year Project. This project is called Evolving Creatures for Mobile Phones.

However, I have decided to call the application itself "Progression, _{for the Android Platform}", or "PAP" for short.

The inspiration for this project s the book 'Permutation City' by 'Greg Egan'.

In 'Permutation City', the idea explored is that if the processing power available was almost infinite, and the time available to the observer to wait for it to happen was equally almost infinite, then one could simulate a planet, a whole solar system down to the sub-atomic particle on this 'computer', and watch life Evolve.

For my purposes, I won't be simulating the sub-atomic particles, nor indeed even the atomic, chemical or DNA particles. Instead I will be considering evolution at the level of genes (I use the word gene here as defined by Richard Dawkins in 'the selfish gene'*, although the simulation will most likely not be that sophisticated). I will be attempting to see how they evolve over time in a Resource-Limited environment, where Survival Of The Fittest decides which individual will survive from one generation to the next.
Occasional copying errors will produce random variants (random variants are a pre-requisite for Evolution, without randomness, there is only Survival, not Evolution), and it will be phone 'Environment' which each creature must be 'Fittest' to survive in

*Richard Dawkins defined the gene in 'the selfish gene' as: any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection