Weasel Program

About Weasel Program Android App

This program is intended for educational purposes - to demonstrate that the process that drives evolutionary systems — random variation combined with non-random cumulative selection — is different from pure chance.

If you or any of you're friends can't seem to grasp how come we see complex life desigens all around us, without a designer (God for some).

This concept was first illustrated in the original Weasel Program by Richard Dawkins.

The basic algorithm is as follows:

1. Start with a random string.
2. Make 100 copies of this string, with a 5% chance per character of that character being replaced with a random character.
3. Compare each new string with the target string , and give each a score (the number of letters in the string that are correct and in the correct position).
4.0 If any of the new strings has a perfect score, halt.
4.1 Otherwise, take the highest scoring string, and go to step 2.

For more info on the topic visit the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program

I'd also recommend reading the book "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins.

p.s. there are some critics that insist that the method is cheating by locking the letters once they are correct, this is not true, you can check the whole code here - https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B2SWliTSzi6bOUx6T3hkVU10RVE&usp=sharing

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