Survival of the prettiest is a phrase coined by the well known theoretical biologist, Richard Dawkins, to describe a program he wrote called bio-morphs. The idea is that a program presents the user with a population of individuals whose appearance - whatever that may be - is dictated by their artificial genes. The user then selects the individual they like the best and it becomes the parent of a new generation. In this way, it is possible to explore the space of all possible individuals in search of truly beautiful 'creations'.
I've written a similar program called Loza. If takes it's name from L-systems and the genetic programming work of John Koza as it's kind of a cross between the two.
It's written in C++ and uses the Linux version of Qt (2.3.1). I've only included the executable for now so I'm afraid you can only run it under Linux. If anyone's interested, I can publish the code but the examples below are from on-going work which is different now. (I'm not very organised about these things!)
Download this gzipped tar-ball and run the binary within it from the Desktop. You'll be presented with a population of abstract pictures. Choose your favorite by left-clicking on it and another population will appear.
If you change your mind, you can press the back button to go back a generation - much like a web browser. To take a closer look at any individual, simply right-click on it and a new window will appear.
Some individuals take longer to render than others so please be patient. Each one is generated in a separate thread so no individual holds the others up. It also means that if you're impatient, the population will tend to evolve quicker pictures!
Here's a screen-shot of Loza running under KDE...
And here are some examples of what you can find.
