What
Mutate is a simple web based application written in PHP to demonstrate the concept of evolution through random mutation and natural selection. The demonstration utilizes human language and randomized characters to mimic the random mutations and a dictionary lookup and human interaction to complete the natural selection of viable mutations.

Why
I viewed a similar web application that was written with the intent of disproving the concept of random mutation and natural selection. Aside from the likelihood that by itself such an application does not disprove the concept, the application not only failed to implement any means of natural selection but it appears it was written with the intent of never producing a viable mutation.

While a sentence entered into the application would start with spaces between words I never observed any mutations that produced a space character, therefore, all the spaces in the original sentence were eventually replaced with characters making it impossible for the experimental mutation simulation to produce a viable sentence.

The application also did not provide an easy means of retaining viable sentences but instead leaves the user stuck with a meaningless mutated sentence. This makes the natural selection process cumbersome for the user.

The objective of the simulation was interesting and should be relatively simple to implement so I took a crack at it myself.

How
The application provides a form for the user to interact and control the mutation and natural selection process. You start with a valid sentence, set the mutation parameters and click the mutate button. The server performs random character mutations on the sentence to create new mutated sentences.

Each mutated sentence is first checked using the dict protocol to check a dictionary for the existence of each word in the mutated sentences. If all the words in a mutated sentence are valid then the user is presented with the sentence to verify it is truly viable and makes sense. When a user clicks on a viable mutated sentence it is transfered to the form and prepared for further mutation.

If a mutated sentence is selected and the mutate button is clicked again to continue the mutation process for this new sentence, a record is stored in a database table to track the mutation process.

The mutation results stored in the database can be viewed using the Mutation Tree. Each sentence in the mutation tree can be selected as a candidate for further mutation testing.

Running A Server
To run your own mutation server you need an http server with PHP 5 and the dict command and either a postgresql or mysql database server (the mysql server must be capable or running innoDB tables).

Download the PHP application tarball, extract into your web directory on your http server, edit the config/dbconfig.php file with your database settings (db_type='pgsql' and db_port='5432' for postgresql, db_type='mysqli' and db_port='3306' for mysql) and the host name for the server that will provide the dictionary dict protocol (default is dict_host='127.0.0.1' if running your own dict server).

Create the table in the database:
CREATE TABLE mutations ( id INTEGER NOT NULL, sentence VARCHAR(120) NOT NULL, mutations INTEGER NOT NULL, parentid INTEGER, mutatetime TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE, PRIMARY KEY (id), FOREIGN KEY (parentid) REFERENCES mutations(id) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE );

Open the web page in a browser and start mutating.

mutate-0.2.tgz