We’ve released our latest citizen science camouflage game Egglab! I’ve been reporting on this for a while here so it’s great to have it released in time for Easter – we’ve had coverage in the Economist, which is helping us recruit egg hunters and 165,000 eggs have been tested so far over the last 3 days. At time of writing we’ve turned over 13 generations starting with random pattern programs and evolving them with small mutations, testing them 5 times with different players and picking the best 50% each time.
Here is an image of some of the first generation of eggs:
And this shows how they’ve developed 13 generations later with the help of many thousands of players:
We can also click on an individual egg and see how it’s evolved over time:
And we see how on average the time taken to find eggs is changing:
Technically this project involves distributed pattern generation on people’s browsers using HTML5 Canvas, making it scalable. Load balancing what is done on the server over three machines and a Facebook enabled subgame – which I’ll use another blog post to explain.
