Evolve Contest & Download
Evolve.exe Contest Update: Bob Enyart offered:
- $500 to the first person who gets 14 of 26 letters to randomly appear in their proper locations, and
- $1,500 to the first person who gets 15 of 25, and
- $2,000 to the first person who gets 16 of 26!
The $500 prize was awarded to Nate from Colorado in 1999.
The $1,500 prize was awarded to Jesse from Pennsylvania in 2010!
The $2,000 prize is still available, so download evolve today and prove that evolution can or cannot happen!
First, download Evolve. When you click on Evolve.exe to run it, the MS Windows program will ask you to enter a number (called a random seed) between 1 and 4,294,967,295. This number provides a starting place for the software to generate random sequences of numbers. (Evolve uses the most advanced random-number generator ever produced.)
Any number from 1 to 4.2 billion is allowed. But we have already logged more than fifty trillion trials. So, if you select a unique number, then if you email your results to Bob@KGOV.com, we will be able to combine your trials with the others we have accumulated so far. So, select a number that is likely to be unique such as your birth date (ex., 1201198) or your height and weight (510185) or your phone number scrambled (2800836978), or even the date on which you started running the program (20060915), or whatever number you'd like to use.
Once you download evolve.exe and enter your random seed number, then you simply hit the Enter Key and the program will begin trying, very rapidly, to randomly assemble the alphabet! (Evolve was written for Bob Enyart Live by the chief software engineer for a company which writes some of the most efficient software in the world for major disc drive manufacturers.)
Let Evolve run and watch the results. Evolve will automatically save its results after every one billion attempts (both the program and the data file are tiny and will not use up any noticeable disk space). At any time, you can hit 's' to save or 'escape' to stop the program. Here at the BEL studios, we let evolve run overnight and during the idle time on our PCs. In this way, we get even more value out of our computer investment, by demonstrating the mathematics of probability theory, and by sharing the results with people who have heard that life could arise by random chance.
(Technical Note: Evolve was written in the mid 1990s, and has not been tested for the newest version of MS Windows. In older versions of Windows it runs perfectly although its display is altered. The Evolve program itself is still fully functional, and the data file it creates remains valid and properly signed! A note to our KGOV friends: If you are a C programmer and would like to update Evolve for newer versions of Windows, please let us know. Thanks!)
© 2010 Bob Enyart Live
