A few days ago I found a nice piece of software on the internet: BoxCar 2D. This is a way to design a car using a genetic algorithm: a population of cars is created at random and then tested on a track chosen by the user. Then the best cars ‘mate’ to get a next generation. Together with a set mutation rate the cars improve over the generations.

Warning: watching this is addictive, it’s far better than television!

My programming skills are rather limited but I wondered if someone maybe could design antennas using one of the (mini)NEC engines and this genetic system?

Update: it seems that this is not such a new idea, at least for developing antennas. A little googling for ‘genetic algorithm antenna’ gave me some 160000 results 🙂

SuperNec seems to be great software for this but at $6080 it seems I’ll stick to Eznec and MMANA for a while.