Evolution Generator Program

Increasing in fitness is indicated already by getting your phrase closer to the target, as Huntard pointed out.
Having a longer phrase is the equivalent to making the environment more complex. Like instead of only needing to breathe oxygen and drink water, it must now also be able to live in a specific temperature range; in effect, they represent the variables that could occur in the environment.
Longer chains would indeed be better and more realistic, but not for the reason you propose. And of course, this is entirely possibly in this programme; you can have anything from 2 or 3 up to 20 characters and more.As to your other points, Percy's programme is only supposed to improve upon an earlier, similar programme without overwhelmingly altering the simplicity of the arrangement. It is a demonstration tool, nothing more, and certainly not meant to completely mimic nature. Such a programme would require hundreds or thousands of lines of programming, with enormous amounts of memory to process it. Percy's, by contrast, is a toy for us to show people (like creationists, students and beginners) how evolution works and what it really looks like.Yes, having those other things would make it more accurate, but it would also mean a huge number of factors that somebody without substantial knowledge of the field simply can't give proper consideration to, much less use effectively. That pretty much destroys its use as a beginner's tool, and more importantly would mean eating up my bandwidth and slowing my laptop down a truckload.

Dr. A is saying that you can choose from 4 different characters. This is sensible for obvious reasons. You on the other hand, presented a fairly outrageous idea that we should use some several thousand. Why? This would have no possible real-world counterpart.But you may have confused the number of possible characters in each position with the length of the string of characters in one individual.

[sigh...]If you begin teaching people about physics, do you immediately make them build particle accelerators or ask them to compute the orbital precession of Mercury? If they are only just beginning chemistry, do you talk to them about pi and sigma bonding in the amylase (sp?) structure?No. You first teach them about basic definitions. Then you teach them about simple mechanics. Then you build that into Newtonian mechanics. Or you would tell them about the proton and the electron. Then you would teach them about orbitals (first the "2-8-8.." rule, then the "1s² 2s² .." rule).Now, at this stage, they don't believe you. So, you can build a catapult, and you can use your simplistic formulae to demonstrate exactly where the shot will land. And you can prove that the formulae work, by getting the aim perfect. The second example is harder, but theoretical chemistry is kind of well, theoretical.Likewise, we show them what we predict will happen in a simple scenario, by using a simple scenario, to demonstrate the basic ideas. Later when they actually understand some of it, we move up the ranks of complexity. Your approach is like asking us to show Year 1 students QM, and then criticising us for not teaching them the truth. Well, maybe it isn't. But how the fuck can they understand the works of Shakespeare if they can't spell 'donkey'?!Real scientists know there are a huge number of factors. And in their experiments, they document these factors and their effects, by first ensuring every other factor is perfectly the same and then changing the one they wish to test. None of these experiments could have viable, much less consistent or rational, results if they didn't account for all of those other factors. Guess what? The experiments work. Every time. So either some asshole deity is playing pranks, or they're dealing with those factors perfectly.

Well yes, they would fail miserably, if by "fail" you mean "does not perfectly predict or map the outcome of a given natural species' evolution in the real world".But unless you can somehow predict weather conditions millenia in advance, observe random effects on the nanoscopic scales, and perfectly emulate all physical laws inside a simulation, who the fuck are you to judge?Science is an approximation to the truth. At times a bad one yes, at others it's so good you can't tell the difference.