Announcing the official public release of Copy Cat 2.0:
a mimicry simulation
Copy Cat is a program I wrote for the Macintosh interface that produces a
natural phenomenon called mimicry. Mimicry is actually quite a
complicated and so-far not completely understood occurance in which one
organism seems like another organism (generally in visual appearance) to
the end of benefitting from the likeness in some way. This is a classic
exploitation scheme, because the mimic is always getting away with
something, evolutionarily speaking.
In November, 1995 I finished Copy Cat 1.0 which was such a tremendously
complicated system that I couldn't figure out how to tweak it into
working. Since then I have slaved over the code and in the past few
weeks have perfected the process of simulating mimicry. Version 2.0 now
confidently produces mimicry nearly every time a new simulation is run.
The interface gives the user far more control over the program than they
need in order to simply produce mimicry, such that simple experiments can
be carried out with the program once one becomes adept at the controls
and confident about the workings of the program. A rich display of
graphs and histograms show all the data necessary in order to demonstrate
the occurance of mimicry in the system and extensive documentation is
provided. I believe that anyone who takes the short amount of time
needed to learn how the Copy Cat environment operates will have no
trouble using the program and seeing how remarkable and unmistakable the
results can be.
Copy Cat 2.0 only runs on a Macintosh computer, requires a color monitor
and may require Color Quickdraw and system 7 (I'm not sure). It is a Fat
binary application and thus will take full advantage of your Power Mac
while still running rather impressively on your 68030 or 68040 (possibly
68020s too). Regardless of which computer you use, no floating point
unit is necessary to run Copy Cat 2.0.
If you want to read more about Copy Cat 2.0 and see a screen capture
check out my page on Copy Cat from my homepage (the url is in my signature).
Otherwise, to instantly download Copy Cat 2.0, the following urls will
take you to directories holding the program:
ftp://ftp.Germany.EU.net/pub/research/softcomp/Alife/packages/copycat/http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/dr37/www/ALHome.html
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Keith Wiley, Electrogenetic Engineer *
University of Maryland at College Park * * * * * *
email: keithw at wam.umd.edu *** ** * * ** *
world wide web: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~keithw * ** ** ***
