HTML5 Genetic Cars

Maybe someone more versed in the state-of-the-art can help me: has the concept of "speciation" ever been applied to genetic algorithms? In my instance, there are two predominant "types" of cars that are doing approximately equally well--the "rhinoboat" and the "assdragger". But when these two solutions are combined in the crossover, I think they make an offspring that is terrible. If the algorithm would mate only the rhinoboats with rhinoboats and assdraggers with assdraggers, I'm convinced we'd end up with…

I wrote the original version of this nearly 20 years ago. Cool to see it still pop up here from time to time. Still runs in the browser thanks to Ruffle: https://peteshadbolt.co.uk/posts/ga/

This is brilliantly cool, and utterly hypnotic. I still always wonder about implementations of genetic algorithms, though. In real life, from which inspiration has been taken, the phenotype is often radically affected by small changes in the genotype. In computer implementation of the concept this is rarely the case. The computer versions are small, clean, spare, and nowhere near as messy as the real life version. I wonder if the messiness actually matters. I wonder if "optimization by genetic algorithm"…