Had an interesting idea. Today I was building a new OpenGL view into darwin@home for the purpose of having some kind of live view of the evolving population. The current buildevo version has a very scientific-looking evolution screen with a tree view, log, and chart of increasing fitness. Problem is: that's no fun.

The new view lets you look at the whole population from above the running bodies, and each body in the population will be represented, either for real or as ball-shaped thingy (less polygons, more performance). It should be possible to have this running real-time during the evolution process without a really serious performance hit.

It's a much more revealing view as well, because it not only shows how far they are running (direction? running in circles?) but it shows where they move. In buildevo there are only numbers all over the place, and these numbers only describe one thing: distance. The new approach lets you click on one and follow along with it from directly overhead.

Then it occurred to me that it would be easy to have both views working at the same time. The body that you click on in the helicopter view could appear in the following-camera view as well at the same time. I can imagine that it would be really cool to have two views at the same time of the same body, running live.

This is the kind of thing that would make evolving things more compelling than they are right now, and the whole idea is to get people involved and thinking about evolution. The goal of creating a hybrid fitness function (measurement and human intuition) requires that I come up with some user interface magnetism.