What is Polyworld?
Polyworld is computer programmer Larry Yaegar’s Artificial Life (also known as Alife and Theoretical Biology) computer simulation, or computational ecology which seeks to mirror real life’s ecological and anthropological development. The environment in which Polyworld’s inhabitants operate in is available for installation across a number of platforms (Mac OS X, Linux) and involves a 2-dimensional plane that is rendered using the QT graphics toolkit and OpenGL. The entities that populate the Polyworld environment act in accordance with their underpinning neural network and demonstrate the whole gamut of human action and interaction; that is, they can eat, drink, reproduce, battle with and kill each other. In short, the simulated organisms either develop survival strategies and prosper or don’t and die. The behavior of the individual simulated organisms that inhabit Polyworld is dictated by each organism’s behavioral suite and the underlying neural network that serves as the organism’s b
