WEASEL

     A textual evolution-simulator

                      by Gary Jones
 

FILES ON THE DISK

     The disk contains the following files:

        WEASEL.EXE   -   The program
        WEASEL.LTR   -   An ASCII version of my covering letter
  and   WEASEL.DOC   -   An ASCII version of this documentation


LANGUAGE

     The  program  is  written in Turbo Pascal 4  and  is  about 
23,600 bytes in size.


COMPATIBILITY

     The  program  has been written to run on all  IBM  PCs  and 
compatibles. The cursor and screen-colouring routines have  been 
tested  on  Hercules, CGA and EGA machines.  VGA  compatibility, 
however,  cannot  be  guaranteed. The program  doesn't  use  any 
printing routines, so no problems there.


WHAT THE PROGRAM DOES

     The  program  simulates  evolution  by  natural  selection. 
First,  a  number  of copies are made of a  random  phrase,  the 
parent. For every character, there is a chance that the  copying 
will  fail;  a random mutation will take place.  Thus  variation 
might exist in the first generation of children. The child  best 
matching  the  target phrase is chosen as the  parent  for  sub-
sequent  generations.  This process continues until  the  target 
phrase is evolved.


OPERATION

     The  opening  screen  presents the user  with  the  default 
settings for:

                 i)      The target phrase
                ii)      The number of children per generation
     and       iii)      The odds against any character randomly                                                                                                                 
                         mutating when being copied.

     Below the display of the default settings is the main menu. 




The options available are:

          E:   EVOLUTION -  This option displays the development 
          from random first attempt to target phrase. Letters in 
          the target phrase are highlighted as they are  matched 
          in  the  progressively improving  children.  The  only 
          children  which  are  displayed are  those  which  are 
          better than any that have gone before.

          R:    RANDOM  production  -   This  option  shows  the 
          hopelessness of purely random production. Creationists 
          often  misrepresent  evolution as a  process  of  pure 
          chance and this option is included to demonstrate  the 
          fact  that  natural  selection is far  from  a  random 
          process.

          C:    CHANGE evolution settings  -   This option  lets 
          the  user change the three default settings  mentioned 
          above. Editing is done in insert mode with full  left-
          and-right  cursor control. Both backspace  and  delete 
          are supported, along with the following:

               [Home]:        Go to start of item
               [End]:         Go to end of item
               [Ctrl][LEFT]:  Delete from cursor to start
               [Ctrl][RIGHT]: Delete from cursor to end.

          With  the  two numerical items, editing  starts  in  a 
          blank  window,  but with the target phrase,  the  last 
          choice  is  in the edit window. If any  item  is  left 
          blank, the previous choice is used.

          I:   INFORMATION  -  This option displays four screens 
          of background information before returning the user to 
          the main menu.

          Q:   QUIT  -   This option quits the program  (without 
          confirmation).


THE TITLE

     By  the  way, the title comes from 'Methinks it is  like  a 
weasel,'  a  quote from Hamlet. The relevance of  the  quote  is 
explained by reading 'The Blind Watchmaker' by Richard Dawkins.




Gary Jones,
23, River Close,
Ruislip,
Middlesex HA4 7UY.

Phone   01-846 2386 (Work)
        0895-672410 (Home)