A browser-based evolutionary simulation with emergent behavior
I’ve been working on a browser-based evolutionary simulation as a personal experiment. Organisms adapt to environmental pressure over time, and there are no explicit goals or scoring, the system is open-ended and runs continuously. I built this mainly to challenge myself and to explore how to surface simulation behavior and statistics in a way that stays readable rather than overwhelming. As a side effect, it’s also something my kids enjoys watching run. Curious what resonates and what doesn’t, and happy to answer questions about the design or tradeoffs.
A browser-based evolutionary simulation with emergent behavior launched on January 14, 2026 with 6 votes, #2,272 of 14,584 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Organisms emerge, adapt, and go extinct in real time. There are no goals, no controls, and no resets. You don’t play it - you watch it unfold.
A continuously running artificial life simulation where simple organisms emerge, evolve, and sometimes go extinct. No goals, just observation.
Does a similar job
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- EAEmergent – Artificial life simulation in a single HTML fileFeb 2026 · emergent-ivory.vercel.app · ▲19
I built an artificial life simulator that fits in one HTML file (~1400 lines ~50KB) with Claude Opus 4.6, interestingly, I didn't even ask it to build the game itself, I've requested to create the software that didn't exist before and not use any dependencies, third-party libraries or ask questions. Firstly Opus 4.6 made photoshop clone that barely worked, but had nice and neat UI with all common features for the image editor, then I've called that crap and asked to really build someting that wasn't there, it made Emergent there. Please check it out and tell what you think, of course it's a…
- ASAnts Sandbox - an ants simulator2022 · ants-sandbox.io · ▲367
I was inspired to make a web based ants simulator after watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81GQNPJip2Y Any feedback appreciated. Best viewed on Chromium based browsers. Firefox is slow for some reason and Safari is not tested as I don't have a Mac.
- AGA Genetic Algorithm I wrote in JavaScript to evolve "Hello World"2010 · puremango.co.uk · ▲109
Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C2020 · github.com · ▲150An interactive ecosystem and evolution simulator written in C and OpenGL, for GNU/Linux. - connor-brooks/ecosim
Language Evolution Simulation2016 · github.com · ▲159
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Source: Show HN post ↗
Launched alongside, January 2026
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Hey HN! I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents. I didn't write a single line of code. Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped! I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity: http://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
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