Last week I found out about the work of Karl Sims from 15 years ago, and his rather amazing creatures karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html

And that brought to mind the work of Roger Alsing from last year rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/

And so I decided to have a crack at the idea of genetic algorithms. I've never looked at them before so it was a bit of a learning exercise.

The premise was, by manipulating the color, position and diagonal edge direction of a grid of polygons can you evolve them into a target shape. In this case the mona lisa and a silhouette portrait from the first page of a google image search.

The beauty of a project like this is that it's a code tweakers delight. Make a change, see if it helped, make a change, see if it helped, make a change, see if it helped...