INTRODUCTION



Darwin Pond is an imaginary gene pool, a primordial puddle of genetic surprises.  More technically, Darwin Pond is an Artificial Life Simulation: a virtual world exhibiting the emergence of life-like behaviors.   But it's more than just a cool thing to watch, you can participate in this artificial life simulation by building little scenarios and setting up experiments.  



Darwin Pond is inhabited by hundreds of wiggly things called "swimmers".  In a way, you could say these swimmers perform tiny histories of the evolution of swimming in the earth's waters by genetically "discovering" ways to get around.  They do this by evolving their anatomies and motions over many generations.  This is why this imaginary body of water is named "Darwin Pond", after Charles Darwin, the creator of the theory of evolution.  



SEXUAL SWIMMERS 

The software you are now running is based on an artificial life project by Jeffrey Ventrella, and published in a paper called, "Sexual Swimmers: Emergent Morphology and Locomotion Without a Fitness Function".  This paper is included as a document on the Darwin Pond CD, in Microsoft Word format.  It is published by MIT Press, in the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, edited by Pattie Maes.  



IN THE BEGINNING...

It all starts with a writhing primordial soup of 400 random swimmers with essentially no swimming abilities.  The principle of survival of the fittest enables a few slightly skillful swimmers to eat and mate with other swimmers, thereby passing their "good" genes on to future generations.  Loser swimmers don't reproduce as much and so their genes don't get passed on to future generations.  Generation after generation, these better genes start to spread, while bad genes die off.  The result: spontaneous emergence of better swimmers.  Soon, after primordial beginnings, the power of evolution becomes visible, as better swimmers start moving around the pond in search of food and mates.  



And it turns out that there is no one BEST swimming style.  Every time you run a new evolution, different swimming styles will come out of the Pond - some of them may be unexpected.  Some of them may make you giggle.



PURPOSE IN LIFE

Swimmers have exactly two goals in life (and not necessarily in this order):



1. Food

2. Sex



If only our lives could be that simple.  



DESIGNER EVOLUTION

While all of this evolution is going on, you can do a little playing God by reaching into this world and tinkering with the delicate Pond ecology, such as changing food growth rate and swimmer energy levels.  You can also do quite a few things to swimmers: create random ones, kill them, feed them, tweak their genes, clone them, transport them to different Ponds, or save their genes in a file and trade them with your friends.



THE GOALS OF DARWIN POND

Darwin Pond is an exploratory artificial life simulation.  It's not a game, in the sense that there is no particular way to win or lose, and there are no good guys or bad guys.  But you are free to make up your own goals as you explore.  For instance, you may try to...



1 Breed the fastest swimmer possible

2 Evolve a population of funny swimmers

3 Just watch it go and learn about the principles of Darwinian Evolution

4 Try to evolve a population of healthy three-legged swimmers

5 Create a nice screensaver

6 Get all the blue swimmers to wipe out all the red ones

7 Find the fewest number of random swimmers and food it takes to spark evolution	
¥8 Breed two different populations that can co-exist in harmony





A QUICK START

Assuming you have successfully installed Darwin Pond on your PC and have started it up, you may want to just take a little dip.  Here is a quick set of activities to help you get your feet wet:



1) Check Out a Few Sample Ponds

For starters, go to the Pond menu, and select Sample Ponds....  Load up one of the Sample Ponds.  These will give you an introduction to the kinds of things that can happen in the Pond.



2) Use the Microscope

Try out some of the microscope tools (the tools can be found in the control panel just above the test tubes: tools 4-7).  There are four tools to use: zoom in; zoom out; move view; and reset view.  These tools will let you zoom in for close inspection or zoom out for the Big Picture.  You can also use the scroll bars to move the microscope view.



3) Do Some Things to a Swimmer

Load up a Sample Pond.  Now select one of the 7 buttons on the lower row of the tools area and go over to the pond and click on a swimmer.  See what happens.  Try another button.  And another!  These tools allow you to do a variety of things to a swimmer.  Explore!



4) Dump a Swimmer into a Test Tube

If you see a swimmer that you like, choose the "select tool" (the first button in the tool set), and click on your favorite swimmer.  Then drag it over to the specimen area, where the test tubes are.  You'll notice that your cursor icon changes as you drag the swimmer over to the specimen area.   Drop it into an empty test tube.  It is now a SPECIMEN.  Watch it wiggle.



5) Save your Specimen

If you've placed your favorite swimmer into a test tube as a specimen, and you want to save its genes in a file, select the "save as" button (the arrow-shaped icon just below the test tube).  Darwin Pond will ask you to name the specimen.  After you name it, a file will be created which holds the specimen's genes.  This specimen can then be loaded up at any time (into an empty test tube) by selecting one of the "load specimen" buttons (one of the arrow-shaped buttons located above the test tube).



6) Save a Pond

The whole state of affairs in the Pond can be saved as a file.  If you've got a pretty good thing going in the Pond and want to give it a name, and save it for later use, go to the Pond menu, and select Save as...



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ORIGINAL MUSIC

Composer Jonah Sharp has created three musical pieces for Darwin Pond, entitled, "Round Trip", "Hula", and "Overflow".  These compositions can be heard by choosing the "Options" menu and selecting "Music".  



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SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT MINIMIZING:



If you minimize Darwin Pond, it will run in the background.  Your swimmers will happily evolve away as you work on more important, more boring things.  



DARWIN POND IS A FULL SCREEN APPLICATION:

While Darwin Pond is running, no other applications can access the screen unless Darwin Pond becomes MINIMIZED.  This is because Darwin Pond runs in "exclusive mode" as a Windows 95 application.  



If Darwin Pond is running, your screensaver will not be able to kick in (since Darwin Pond runs in exclusive mode), UNLESS you have a dialog box open when the screensaver is ready to kick in.  In this case, the screensaver is likely to cause Darwin Pond to only minimize, but not actually run, on its first attempt.  The screensaver's second attempt to kick in will likely be successful.  Once the screensaver has minimized Darwin Pond, you can recover by selecting the Darwin Pond icon in the task bar.  



NOTE: if Windows95 minimizes Darwin Pond instead of you, Darwin Pond will NOT continue to run in the background.  



It is suggested that you not do housecleaning while running Darwin Pond (like moving files around from within the Save or Load dialog boxes). Windows95 is likely to minimize Darwin Pond while copying/moving files.  This can be bothersome.  



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SOUND:

No other applications can share the sound card while Darwin Pond is running.  The reason has to do with the nature in which Microsoft's Direct Sound handles the sharing of the sound card among multiple applications.  