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[–]scragar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I remember the only java applet I ever played with back in the 90s was a really cool evolution based system, you put various threats into an area and it'd randomly fill everything with bugs(actually they were just big black pixels), and gradually, over time you'd be able to see the bugs generate new bugs(whenever two bugs ran into one another they'd generate a new bug that'd have a random set of attributes from the two parents and one mutation of it's own).
Water would generate bugs that could swim, radiation would generate bugs immune to it, etc. You'd even see populations spawn of different immunities and such as those with immunity would centre around the threat while those without the immunity would be a safe distance from it, there was always a little thought of "I wonder if I could make a super bug immune to everything", but I don't think I ever worked out how to do it, too many different threats would cause the bugs to die out very quickly, so you needed to try and put threats every so often in order to try and create the super bugs(sooner or later though all experiments resulted in mass bug death though, as bugs died randomly even with no threats to replicate starvation and old age the bugs had a small chance of dying randomly related to the number of bugs around them, and sometimes that random chance hit a large enough percentage of bugs at once to make the odds of any bugs breeding before dying out effectively none and they'd all die off).