The story of an artificial virtual world

Foreword

It all started with thinking about the world for a cigarette and a cup of coffee. Many people thought about the questions “where did we come from,” “how is everything in reality”. For example, we can assume that we are the fleeting thought of some creature who invented our world, ourselves, and our ideas, desires, dreams. However, after a second of forgetting about it, but for us this second still lasts. Or everything is a computer program, an emulator in some laboratory, in the manner of a matrix. Thoughts are not new, sometime someone has already thought them all, and at the last even made a film, but not one.

The thought of computer implementation and interested me. Got to think about the unimaginable amount of data that contains the flight of the wind, the light of the sun, the movement of wheat ears on the field on a sunny morning, the life of microbes.


')
In the end, I decided: why think and dream, if you can just try? From this began the creation of my world.

And God created the earth and saw that it was good.

I must say, I did the basic faster than my competitor. Not in a week, but in just two days :)

He did in the evenings, in his free time. I created base classes, thinking about what to do next. On the second evening, a new world appeared before me, populated with rare bushes of grass.

And I saw that it was good :) And he created two living creatures, giving the name to their kind: “flax”. The names of the creatures, according to the old and good tradition, were Adam and Eve.

At first, they hesitantly chewed on nearby growing bushes. Saturated, began to look closely to each other. And finally, between them broke out an unearthly love, which gave birth to offspring. Life began to grow like a snowball. And the conditions for that were very good: no enemies for you, food, partners, the whole world is provided only to them.

If something becomes good somewhere, then, according to the law of meanness, Comrade Oblom comes and spoils everything. The population took on too fast growth, too many resources were needed to support so many biological units. The vegetation did not have time to really grow as it was eaten by some kind of mimic run .

There was a crisis, to which everything was rolling. Food almost gone. The Flaxes were starving, they were scouring for food, many were dying of hunger, the females who spent a lot of energy on the production of offspring also did not have time to live long enough to die from exhaustion.

It was then that the cross loomed on their stories. The threat of being wiped off the face of the earth crept almost close.

Suddenly something has changed. At first, one of them tasted the kindred. Then another. Hunger pushed them to survive at all costs. Their offspring were a little less shy and more and more tasted the taste of blood. Started an epidemic of hungry rage, rallied with hunger. Together, they mowed down almost the entire population of the world, and the remaining persistent fell down because of their small number and lack of vegetation.

The green world with thousands of living creatures turned into a barren desert, plunged into darkness.

Act of the second. Resurrection in the Ruins

I sat down to improve, in parallel analyzing the situation. Yes, I assumed beforehand that this could happen and, with total starvation, laid a small chance of the appearance of carnivores. But this did not save the situation, only worsened.

Additional parameters of force, paw speed, disease, viruses, immunity, a lot has been added. I was counting on creating a self-regulatory biological system that would not allow the situation to go out of control. And so, the last lines are added. Run

This time everything went more smoothly. Creatures also began to eat weed, run, multiply. Carnivores appeared as an alternative to herbivores. They were strong, powerful, but not as agile and fast as herbivores. In good shape, it was not difficult to run away from the enemy, while weakened organisms were doomed to death from predatory hunters. Thus, the gene pool improved, the offspring gave good results. Not one hundred percent, because in the world now there were diseases and viruses, some were transmitted not only to the partner during mating, but also to the offspring born of sick parents.

It was already more like a balanced biological system, not doomed to the apparent extinction very near. Some herbivores even, occasionally, managed to resist predators who wanted to eat them.

Yes, and I did not waste time in vain. I was preparing a new improvement designed to emulate genes in a wider sense than a simple set of parameters. Heredity, mutations - this is what allows the species to change over time, as an exact detail that emerges from the rough workpiece of the master. Natural selection.

Flaxes even realized that holding on to their own kind was safer than being a loner. More chances to save the herbivore from predators, less labor in finding a partner for mating. Some nomadic "settlements" began to appear.

There was an idea to create a simple neural network to shape the behavior of individual creatures in the course of their life, at the level of “fire - burned - fire - not suitable”. But little knowledge in this, without a doubt, an interesting area and outwardly assumed the required amount of resources for normal functioning put the idea in a distant box marked "maybe someday."

But such things as limb parameters, weight and many other characteristics were thought out. There was a possibility that, escaping from the enemy for a long time, creatures that closely communicated with each other would eventually give rise to a new species — with wings, for example. The scatter of mutations and possibilities of a random course of events postponed even an attempt to imagine what kind of creatures and of whatever kind they appeared. Unsuccessful mutants would die because of their losing addition and balance, the successful ones could generate a new species, which eventually claimed its right to a place under the sun.

The emergence of new species suddenly interrupted the move from server to server, then problems with the subdomain and, finally, the lack of time for the development of this young world.

Afterword

But I am sure that their story is not over. In their world, time was frozen by one moment, which ceased all movement. But this world has not disappeared and still exists in a huge number of columns and lines of the database on my flash drive, dangling the key fob on the keys to the apartment.

The console, which I threw in a hurry for a more comfortable perception of what is happening
(still could not reach to make a more informative overview):