DNA is the "blueprint" of most living organisms. It is at the crux of evolution as it defines -roughly speaking- the hereditary characteristics of a living being. Not familiar with DNA? Check out this video, this interactive website or this old-school lesson for info.

In our simulation, the behaviour of the Creatures is going to be determined mostly by their DNA, with a pinch of randomness here and there.

We have settled on a 3-bases single-strand genetic information structure. A chromosome will be represented by a string of letters. Possible letters will be A, the beginning of a gene, O, the end of a gene, and B, C and D, the bases. A gene will be any sequence of letters beginning by a A and finishing by a O, with only B's, C's and D's in between.

For example:
ABBCDDCBDBCO is a gene
ABCDBBDC is not a gene
BDCBCBDO is not a gene
ACBDBCACO is not a gene, but its substring ACO is
ADBABCDDBCOCBDDO is not a gene, but its substring ABCDDBCO is

With this structure, it is not possible to have a gene which is a substring of another gene.

For game design and performance purposes, for now we set the maximum length of a useful gene to be of 6 bases. Any gene longer than this will have not impact on its bearer.