Many moons ago, back in 2008, while in a debate on an atheist-oriented phpBB site (as was the fashion back then), I ended up writing a couple of scripts, in ruby, to illustrate a point about how mutation and selection can, given enough time, result in something with the appearance of design.
The code was far from a mic-drop body of evidence (it wasn't meant to be), I think it did an okay job of showing how nothing more than just mutating something and selecting for the "fitter" options can get you somewhere meaningful given enough time.
No matter, either you get the illustration or you don't. That's not important.
Fast forward 15 years and I was thinking that a Textual version of the code might be fun.
This is a version of
selection2.
Turns out it is fun!
If you want to play with this, the best method is going to be to install
with pipx:
$ pipx install evolve-wordsthen simply run evolve-words.
While this code should work fine on any operating system, it's really coded to work on a system that provides one of the two following files:
/usr/dict/words/usr/share/dict/words
That does, of course, mean it's unlikely to work fine on Windows given neither of them will be there. At some point in the very near future I'll add support for loading words from a file whose name is passed on the command line, or something similar.
