Thinking about your idea here led me to consider how one would feed randomness into your model, as of course
one of the key points of evolutionary theory is "random mutation".

My understanding is that it is not possible to get true randomness in a program using a seed value and the "rand()"
type functions that can be found in programming languages.

Connecting some type of device such as a Geiger counter to a PC and sampling the output of such a device is certainly
one way to get truly random numbers. I am wondering if anyone else has used something else such as stock price changes, as according to finance theory stock prices change in a "random walk". Putting code together to grab stock prices has obviously
been done before, but I wonder if anyone has done so for the purpose of extracting random values.

Update 04-04-06: A readable and informative document titled "Cryptographic Random Numbers" by Carl Ellison can be found here.

In reply to Re: Using Perl to simulate evolution. by Scott7477
in thread Using Perl to simulate evolution. by Mychael

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.