Welcome to Inselect!

The Natural Selection Game

There are 50 insects hidden in a landscape of your choice.
You are a predator and you must catch 25 of them as fast as possible!
The surviving insects reproduce and form the next generation.

Time's up!

Unfortunately, you didn't manage to catch enough insects...

Well done!

You earn 10 points for completing the level!
You also earn points because you still had seconds left.

You now have a total of points!

Insect evolution

About

Game rules

• This game is based on a simple model of the mechanism of natural selection.
• The student chooses a habitat dominated by a given color and plays the role of a predator hunting insects.
• Over the course of the game, several generations of insects follow one another. In each generation, the student must catch 25 insects (out of 50) as fast as possible.
• The available time starts at 30 seconds, then one second is removed at each generation.
• Across generations, the student accumulates as many points as the number of seconds left at the end of each hunt, plus 10 points per successful generation. The goal is to score as many points as possible.
• The game stops if the student fails to catch 25 insects within the time limit. They can then try again or view the results, which ends the game permanently.
• In the first generation, insect colors are generated randomly.
• Only the surviving insects reproduce and thus form the next generation.
• Reproduction is asexual. Each insect lays two eggs before dying of natural causes.
• Each new insect has a color very close to its parent, but not necessarily identical.
• This slight change in color between a parent and its offspring represents random mutations.
• On the color charts, hue variation is shown vertically and brightness variation horizontally.
• On the results graph, the unit of distance is the degree because the color space is projected onto a sphere whose two opposite poles are white and black. The bars on this graph represent the standard deviations above and below the mean, computed independently (asymmetric distribution of distances).