Darwin's World

Darwin'sWorld is one of my all-time favorite assignments. It's too big for a one-week assignment, but it builds something fun to play with and it emphasizes useful issues. Its features include...

• It's fun and visual -- it builds something that the students enjoy playing around with
• It's a medium hard CS2 project; big enough to have some real decomp
• As a hidden agenda, it shows the students how simple an interpreter can be, and it foreshadows the halting problem

In my talk at SIG-CSE I think everyone got the "simulator" aspect of the program -- the creatures run around and do stuff to each other. However, the questions I got afterwards made it clear that I did not do a good job of emphasizing the more interesting "interpreter" aspect of the creatures -- each species is defined by its textual species program which can be programmed independently of Darwin's world. IMHO the interpreter is the most valuable part of the assignment. Anyway please check it out...

• The original assignment handout Dawin92.pdf -- written in Pascal.
• The modern Eric Roberts version using his portable C libraries Darwin99.pdf
• A directory of creature programs

Cheers,
Nick Parlante