The science being visualized is a demonstration of artificial life by generating computer programs that mimic organic life in simple ways. The process works as follows. Templates are generated by users on the World Wide Web. The templates are then used to generate populations of creatures who live out their existence in a simulated world. Additionally, autonomous agents are distributed throughout the simulated world, reporting and generating statistics of events that occur. This information is relayed back to the World Wide Web to provide information updates to the individuals who have generated creature templates.

The visualization techniques used not only display the views of the simulated creatures but also report on average life of populations, birth and death rates, and areas of largest population. The amount of network traffic and processor distribution is also indicated, to provide viewers with a sense of the computing resources being used.

This application was a GII Testbed application demonstrated at ACM / IEEE Supercomputing ’95.