Each organism carries a small inherited genome: speed, size and sense radius. Every frame it senses the nearest food particle within its sense radius and steers toward it; energy changes each second as:
dE/dt = intake(food eaten) − metabolic_pressure · (0.9 + 1.4·speed² + size)
Locomotion cost scales with the square of speed — cheap to be efficient, expensive to be fast — so which genome wins depends entirely on the sliders:
- Mutation rate — how far a child's traits drift from its parent's (Gaussian noise) at each reproduction event.
- Resource abundance — food particles spawned per second. Scarce food selects for slow, efficient foragers; abundant food lets fast, wide-ranging organisms dominate.
- Metabolic pressure — a global multiplier on energy cost. High pressure is a harsh environment that punishes large, fast genomes and crashes the population unless efficient mutants appear.
When energy exceeds a reproduction threshold the organism splits: one child inherits a mutated copy of the genome and half the parent's energy. When energy reaches zero the organism dies and its colour (fast=warm, efficient=cool) at any moment shows which strategy is currently winning the selection race — exactly the "mutation rate vs resource availability" trade-off that drives real evolutionary dynamics.