Lots of people on the Reddit thread are really into it: "It's heartbreaking when it spawns a totally sweet car, upside down." "my entire office is idle cheering nonentities on"
It's hard to imagine anyone getting as excited about the swf you just linked to.
It's interesting from a user experience perspective as the programs are doing almost the same thing.
There's the colorfulness of the one on Reddit, making the cars more personable. In contrast, the other program kills unsuccessful cars very quickly, without giving you time to think about why the car was unsuccessful/feel its pain. Also, the load bearing concept might be cool in theory, but I think it makes it more difficult for the viewer to process what's going on.
It's also interesting how both authors consciously chose to make their algorithms worse so that the program wouldn't converge to a solution as quickly.
I think the reason behind this is struggle. The original killed cars as soon as they started struggling (the load hits the ground). The latest allows you to watch bad implementations struggle to traverse the landscape.
That's all. There's probably a deep lesson in there somewhere.
It's hard to imagine anyone getting as excited about the swf you just linked to.
It's interesting from a user experience perspective as the programs are doing almost the same thing.
There's the colorfulness of the one on Reddit, making the cars more personable. In contrast, the other program kills unsuccessful cars very quickly, without giving you time to think about why the car was unsuccessful/feel its pain. Also, the load bearing concept might be cool in theory, but I think it makes it more difficult for the viewer to process what's going on.
It's also interesting how both authors consciously chose to make their algorithms worse so that the program wouldn't converge to a solution as quickly.