Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm sure many of you have fiddled with boxcar2d at some point or other. Well, the Genetic Algorithm 2d Car Thingy is just like that, except it's written in HTML5, so it can be run on virtually anything (even mobile phones without Flashplayer support).

For those that haven't, it's more or less what it says on the can. It makes little two wheeled cars with varying attributes, runs them over a length of terrain (with bumps and hills, etc), finds which cars got the furthest, keeps them, breeds them together and mutates them slightly, and then runs the whole simulation over again. If the next generation of cars did better, then great. If not, it keeps doing it until they do.

So yes, genetics with cars. It's quite fascinating.

But now, onto the challenge (or experiment really, since you can't make user changes in this version, unlike boxcar2d).

You can use a string to seed the initial track along with other options available. In time honoured tradition, we could use "bay12" as our initial seed and compare distances travelled by our own mob of genetically (im)perfect cars, just for giggles.

You can leave it running on your PC or phone overnight (just set the dev options on your phone to Stay Awake while charging). You can save results locally and run the sim later as well. And if we're all using the same track, then we can compare results. For, umm, science? I don't know. Mainly just to see how alike the better cars are, or how different.

So yes. I chose this version of boxcar due to compatibility, ability to save locally, and because it works. It's not as "good" as boxcar2d, isn't interconnected like another version, but it works.

So settings:

Go to "Create new world with seed". Enter "bay12", without the quotes, all lowercase.

Make sure the "Floor" option is set to "fixed".

Gravity set to Earth 9.81

Change whatever other options you'd like. It's probably best to save every few hours or so, in case it crashes.

Compare results, and take screenshots if possible.
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The track isn't bad, but like all of them, it gets worse the further your cars make it.

Here's the website url to try it out:

http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/

Why waste all that computing power on your table or sitting in your pocket all weekend, when you could be breeding boxcars with them?