A fun little game: GenePool

GenePool is an evolution simulation game in which hundreds of little virtual organisms called swimbots are subject to the forces of darwinian evolution by making them compete for food and sex in a small aquatic environment.

A typical starting pool, zoomed in

The creatures are generated randomly at the start from a number of geometric pieces of different shape and size, and they immediately begin to pursue one of the two objectives their 2-bit brain is capable of: eat and mate.

mine? mine! mine mine mine!!!

When hungry, two little green bars resembling a mouth will sprout from their bodies and they will try to swim towards the nearest little green pellet, the pool's only food source.

At first, the swimbots are very inefficient. They flail their limbs randomly when trying to go in a particular direction, and many end up swimming in circles, or even away from the pellet. Only those that can coordinate their movements well enough survive, leaving the rest to die a slow death at the hands of natural selection.

Betty! How could you?!

When the swimbot's hunger is satiated it's time to quell their other need. The little mouth turns into an arrow and the swimmer starts looking for a suitable mate. Swimbots can mate with any other member of the pool. They prefer, by default, one that matches their color scheme, but the sexual preference can be set to a number of other criteria: size, speed, length, etc.


After mating they leave behind a little swimbot, a genetic average of the two parents, which rapidly matures. Sometimes the offspring will be born with a small mutation, which might help it survive and spread its genes, thus driving evolution forward in the pool.

After leaving the simulation run for a while, one or two species will start dominating the pool. These will be much more efficient swimmers than their ancestors, having gone through several generations of evolution in a single afternoon.

Zerg rush kekekeke

Gene Pool was created by Jeffrey Ventrella

The latest version of the game, for both Mac and PC, can be downloaded for FREE from here http://www.swimbots.com/