Egglab

Egglab was an online computer game in which players search for hidden eggs against different backgrounds to help scientists make new discoveries concerning camouflage and its evolution. The game featured in The Economist, The Guardian and Popular Science and was played by over 40,000 people.

The game was a genuine scientific experiment that anyone around the world with a computer, smartphone or tablet could take part in, with the aim to understand how different types of camouflage evolve in different habitat types and investigate how camouflage works to defeat predator vision and improve survival chances.

Egglab used genetic programming to artificially evolve new patterns based on the behaviours of the humans who are playing the game. It distributed the pattern generation processing across browsers used by players, leaving the server only to store and sort the programs which represent the genomes of successful individuals.

Egglab is a free software game - the source code is here.