I was interested in the evolution of Altruism. I knew about the theory explaining why humans make sacrifices for others but I wanted to witness the process of evolution myself so I created a simulation. In the simulation, organisms consumed food each day and received a random amount of food each day. Organisms died if they ran out of food but could ask other organisms in their group for food. If their request was denied they died. The decision to share food is made by a genetic program. I simulated the darwinian principles of evolution and ran the program over hundreds of generations. Over time organisms evolved to help each other. Interesting but familiar phenomena occurred. For example the bystander affect was very strong. They were much more likely to share food with family when there are not bystanders and food is plentiful.
Use used the google sheets API in order to display the data in real time. The slides with the presentation and video of this can be found in the root of the project.
The jar file is also in the root. To run it just donwload the jar and then from the command line do: java -jar Altruism.jar