evolution simulation

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

Primer simulates green beard altruism, where individuals recognize and help others carrying a shared marker, and shows how imposters affect its evolution. It is an animated evolution simulation based on published papers.

Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.

George Hotz gives a SXSW 2019 talk on the idea that we live in a simulation and asks what actions would be available from inside it. He takes a hacker's view of whether it could be escaped.

An interview with Nick Bostrom at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute presenting his simulation argument: at least one of three propositions about posthuman civilizations and ancestor simulations must be true.

David Shaw of D. E. Shaw Research presents Anton, a special-purpose machine that speeds up biomolecular simulations about a hundred-fold. The lecture covers molecular dynamics and how simulation helps understand how drugs bind.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

Veritasium visits Richard Lenski's lab to explain the decades-long E. coli evolution experiment, which asks how repeatable evolution is and shows bacteria evolving to use a new food source.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

A two-minute time-lapse from the Kishony Lab showing bacteria spreading across a giant petri dish with increasing antibiotic doses, evolving resistance as they go.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky lectures on the evolution of behavior, including the Prisoner's Dilemma and tit-for-tat strategies in animals. It is part of his Human Behavioral Biology course.

A one-minute visualization of a simulated ant colony in which ants follow pheromone trails, with the source code on GitHub. It shows emergent behavior arising from simple rules.

A restored 1994 video of Karl Sims' research on evolved virtual creatures, where simulated block creatures are bred through artificial evolution to swim, walk, follow and compete. It is a landmark demonstration of genetic algorithms in physics simulation.

A Discovery Channel computer simulation of a large asteroid impact on Earth, showing the scale of the devastation. It sits in a broader context of early Earth impacts and the moon-forming collision.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

An excerpt from Richard Dawkins's lecture on Climbing Mount Improbable demonstrating how a complex eye can evolve through incremental steps. It answers the creationist irreducible complexity argument.

SpaceX engineers present at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference on a multi-physics code that simulates the full-scale Raptor methane engine. It covers GPU-based turbulent combustion modeling with adaptive grids and wavelet compression.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

A short PBS Eons episode on carcinization, the repeated independent evolution of crab-like bodies in unrelated crustaceans, and what makes that form so successful.

A NASA and Durham University supercomputer simulation suggesting the Moon may have formed within hours of a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body. It is one of the highest-resolution giant-impact simulations run.

Eric Weinstein interviews economist Timur Kuran on The Portal about preference falsification and how societies where people hide their real views can tip into revolutions.

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

AngeTheGreat describes building a physically realistic internal combustion engine simulator in C++, drawing on fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry. It generates procedural audio for engines such as a V8.

A clip from Channel 4's Inside Nature's Giants in which Richard Dawkins shows the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe during a dissection. The nerve takes a long detour down the neck and back up.

Two Minute Papers covers a paper on speeding up fluid and smoke simulation with convolutional networks. It contrasts the approach with earlier regression forest methods.

In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.

Will Wilson explains autonomous testing: using deterministic simulation and fuzzing, building on FoundationDB's approach, to test software continuously. It sets out the ideas behind his later company Antithesis.

Energy scholar Vaclav Smil argues that global energy transitions are slow and that renewable targets should not rest on wishful thinking. He appraises how energy dependencies are likely to change and asks for using much less.

Revolution OS is a feature-length documentary on the history of free software and Linux. It covers Stallman and the GNU project, Torvalds and the kernel, and Raymond and Perens on open source, starting from the era of freely shared hobbyist code.

Ross Scott's Game Dungeon episode critiques Deus Ex: Human Revolution, looking at its design, politics and visual style. It is part of his series of opinionated game reviews.

A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.

Jake Vanderplas's PyCon 2016 talk shows how sampling-based methods such as simulation, shuffling and bootstrapping make statistics intuitive. His pitch is that if you can write a for-loop, you can do statistics.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Lex Fridman talks with Tufts biologist Michael Levin about bioelectricity, embryogenesis, xenobots and how cells collectively pursue goals. They range into cognition, evolution and the possibility of aliens.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote argues that the computer revolution has not really happened yet, reflecting on how computing, objects and the web fall short of their potential.

Terry Davis, author of TempleOS, demonstrates his SimStructure physics simulator and builds a PID controller using math from Numerical Recipes in C. The description notes PID controllers are used in everything from rockets to espresso machines.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

Veritasium examines the role of luck in success, with simulations and examples showing how small advantages and chance can compound. It argues that top outcomes are disproportionately luck-driven while still crediting effort.