Haldane, Remine, and Weasels

Wesley R. Elsberry (welsberr@orca.tamu.edu)
Tue, 17 Jun 97 21:18:47 CDT

I mentioned earlier that replacing the now-missing "weasel"
program described by Dawkins in "The Blind Watchmaker" would
not be a difficult task. I'm happy to announce the
availability of a "weasel" replication. Programmed in Delphi 2,
the executable runs under Win95 or NT. The source code ended
up at 154 lines, rather than topping the predicted couple of
hundred lines. The target string, character pool, mutation
rate, and population size are under user control.

A population size of 100 and mutation rate of 6% seems to
provide similar results to those reported by Dawkins.

The executable is available via anonymous ftp at
inia.tamug.tamu.edu in the pub directory as "weasel00.exe".

I think that I can easily demonstrate an interest in the "live"
issue of test by computer simulation.

Wesley