gm gm @OhHungryArtist As a quick addition to your imaginative story - I’m sure your creative mind will immediately come up with something to complement the "God story": 🌟 Summary of the conditions and work of Karl Sims up to 1994 (especially “Evolved Virtual Creatures”, SIGGRAPH 1994) ✨️ Karl Sims 🪽 showed in the early 1990s (mainly 1991–1994) that real Darwinian evolution can happen inside a computer - with exactly the same core principles as in real nature: Variation (mutation recombination), inheritance, and natural selection through different survival and reproductive successes. 💠The key point: He only had to set the initial conditions. After that, the process ran completely on its own and produced incredible diversity and complexity. From simple starting creatures (often just a few blocks), complex swimmers, runners, jumpers, chasers, and even competing “fighters” emerged. Their bodies and behaviors became more and more sophisticated - exactly like in nature, but in just a few hours of compute time on a Connection Machine CM-5. 💠 This is exactly what Darwin observed in the real world - except Sims rebuilt it in the computer in 1994 and proved it: If you set the right initial conditions, evolution happens all by itself. The rest is pure self-organization and time. The diversity of species emerges on its own - without the creator having to design every single creature. The creatures themselves “invent” ever more sophisticated solutions (swimming, running, fighting…). 💠Continuing researchers: Dan Lessin, Nicolas Lassabe, Jeff Clune (@jeffclune) - their work on “Open-Ended Behavioral Complexity” builds directly on Sims. 💠 Further info sources: 🫴karlsims.com/evolved-virtual… 🫴 jeffclune.com → Section “Talks & Videos” with all slides and recordings (no book - he’s a pure researcher with hundreds of highly cited papers) [*Query via Grok]