The story of one artificial virtual world

Foreword

It all started with thinking about the world over a cigarette and a cup of coffee. Many people thought about the questions “where did we come from”, “how is everything really”. For example, we can assume that we are a fleeting thought of some creature who invented both our world and ourselves, and our ideas, desires, dreams. However, after a second who forgot about it, but for us this second continues to this day. Or everything - a computer program, an emulator in some laboratory, in the manner of a matrix. Thoughts are not new, anybody ever thought all of them, but according to the latter they even shot a film, but not one.

The idea of ​​computer implementation interested me. Made me think about the unimaginable amount of data that contains the flight of the wind, the light of the sun, the movement of ears of wheat 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 he saw that it was good

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

in the evenings, in my free time. Created base classes, on the go thinking what to do next. On the second evening, a new world appeared before me, populated by rare bushes of grass.

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

At first they chewed indecisively around the bushes growing nearby. Satisfied, they began to look closely at each other. And finally, an unearthly love broke out between them, giving birth to offspring. Life began to grow like a snowball. And the conditions for that were very good: there are no enemies for you, there is food, there are partners, the whole world is left only to them.

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

There was a crisis, to which everything rolled. There was practically no food. Phloxes starved, they scoured in search of food, many died of hunger, females who spent a lot of effort on producing offspring also did not have enough time to live, dying from exhaustion.

And then a cross loomed on their history. The threat of being wiped off the face of the earth crept almost up close.

Suddenly, something has changed. First, one of them tasted a relative. 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. An epidemic of hungry rage rallied with hunger. Together, they mowed out almost the entire population of the world, and the remaining persistent ones fell down due to their small numbers and lack of vegetation.

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

Act two. Resurrection on the ruins

I sat down for improvement, while analyzing the situation. Yes, in advance I suggested that this could happen and, with total starvation, laid a small chance of the appearance of carnivores. But this did not save the situation, it only worsened.

Additional parameters of strength, paw speed, disease, viruses, immunity, a lot has been supplemented. I counted on the creation of a self-regulatory biological system that would not allow the situation to get out of control. And now, the last lines are added. Launch.

This time everything went more smoothly. Creatures also began to eat grass, run, breed. Carnivores appeared as an alternative to herbivores. They were strong, powerful, but not as dexterous and quick as herbivores. In good shape, it was not difficult to escape from the enemy, while weakened organisms were doomed to die 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 offspring born from sick parents.

It was already more like a balanced biological system, not doomed to visible extinction very visible. Some herbivores even occasionally managed to fight back predators who wanted to feast on them.

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

The fluxes even realized that keeping their own kind was safer than being alone. More likely to be saved by herbivores from predators, less labor to find a mating partner. Some nomadic “settlements” began to appear.

There was an idea to create a simple neural network for the formation of the behavior of individual creatures in the course of their life, at the level of “fire - burned - fire - I do not fit.” But a little knowledge in this undoubtedly interesting area and offhand the estimated necessary amount of resources for normal functioning put the idea in a distant box marked "maybe someday."

But such things as parameters of limbs, weight and many other characteristics were thought out. There was a possibility that, fleeing from the enemy for a long time, beings that closely communicated with each other would eventually give rise to a new species - with wings, for example. The spread of mutations and the possibilities of a random course of events postponed even an attempt to imagine what kind of creatures and whatever kind appeared. Unsuccessful mutants would die due to their losing constitution and balance, successful ones could give rise to a new species, which over time claimed their right to a place in the sun.

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

Afterword

But I’m sure that this is not the end of their story. In their world, time froze with one moment that stopped all movement. But this world has not disappeared and still exists in a huge number of columns and rows of the database on my USB flash drive, dangling a keychain on the keys to the apartment.

The console, which I threw up in a hurry for a more convenient perception of what is happening
(I still couldn’t get my hands on a more informative overview):