Re: [Polyworld-develop] Spore and Genes

[Larry Y. <la...@us...>]

At 4:49 PM -0400 9/7/08, Andrew wrote:
>I think the computational complexity would become overwhelming.  At some point, its faster to watch evolution take place in a test tube than a ALife simuation, isn't it?

Well, considering that it took 3 or 4 *billion* years to go from single-celled organisms to us (plus roughly another billion to go from prebiota to those single-celled organisms), maybe not so much. :)  But, yes, it was worrying a lot about how to blend necessary limits on computational complexity with desired biological verisimilitude plus a desire to ultimately investigate AI that led to all of the design decisions in Polyworld.

- larryy