Car Genetic Algorithm

I could watch this for hours. Andy Baio found it in the comments of this Reddit link. From the author:

This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash.

The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and inital positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the “mean” and “best” fitness.

Pretty cool stuff. Says a lot about how many iterations genetic algorithms take. This one is fairly simple and still takes a few hours.