Boingboing posted this today:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/08/genetic-algorithm-ev.html

Matthew sez, “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 initial positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the ‘mean’ and ‘best’ fitness.”

…and I left it running in a tab all day; was quite pleased at how quickly it converged on the form of the classic “dirt bike”:

…with large front wheel, smaller rear, long rear swing-arm, rider weight forwards; a case of theory agreeing with real life, perhaps?

The only flaw is that the author of the code doesn’t realise what he’s done. He thinks it’s a car…