Fox's Glacier Mints

Only there is no polar bear sitting on it, nor a smarmy fox pointing at it, and in fact, it's not really a mint. Just a glacier. A beautiful, incredible, disappearing glacier.

On board ship, we had a naturalist called Milos, who told us interesting stuff and gave illustrated talks. One of his talks was about the sky at night. He took us all the way back to the big bang, it was fabulous. But it wasn't far enough for me, so I had to work out for myself what must have happened before then.

Imagine it, Sicily, 1923. No, sorry, that was Sofia in 'The Golden Girls'.
Imagine it, Infinity, six billion and a funny squiggle years ago. The Celestial Programmers are having a cuppa in the staff room.
XGVG - So, the new proggie, is it ready to go yet?
YHWH - Yep, yep, just about, I've fixed the little time blip,
XGVG - Excellent, I knew you only had to remodulate,
YHWH - Pretty much, yeah, oh and I had to get my head around this whole procreation thingie.
XGVG - Wha? Procreation, wtf's that?
YHWH - Oh, it's something I've built in to make it all a bit more interesting, actually, I'm anticipating it being very interesting,
XGVG - I'm intrigued, do tell...
YHWH - Well, it's a bit of an odd concept really. See, when I boot the whole thing up - I'm calling it 'The Big Bang' as a sort of working title, stuff gets formed, then it sort of spills out everywhere and some of it sticks together and whatnot, anyhoo, cut a long story short, after a relatively short amount of time, we get to the really good bit of the programme, and what I am calling 'Life'..
XGVG - Working title?
YHWH - Working title, pops up, in fact, some might say it looks like a bit of a googly in the programming, but I can assure you it's intentional. So, 'Life', gets more and more complicated, but in order to keep going, it has to somehow reproduce itself....
XGVG - Ah..because of the time thingie....
YHWH - Because of the time thingie, right, so, at first, the units of 'Life' can reproduce by splitting themselves, but when it gets VERY complicated, and here's the beauty of this, I'm dead pleased about it, two units will have to get together and sort of fuse and then divide to form a new unit.
XGVG - Huh, clever, I like it, so what's it based on?
YHWH - Was hoping you'd ask, here's the bit I really like, it's based on numbers,
XGVG - No way...
YHWH - Yes way, numbers right? Numbers work here, numbers work within the programme,
XGVG - THAT is elegant,
YHWH - Right? AND...to make it even more interesting, I have made two equal but different halves, but I've given them a different number of coding strings,
XGVG - Awesome! Wait, do we still say awesome?
YHWH - I believe we do, and are! So, one type will have three strands of code, the other four,
XGVG - Equal, different and one has an extra string of coding, I cannot wait to see it running. So, the whole programme, do you have a title for that?
YHWH - Eh...I dunno, I'm a bit stuck really, I thought of 'Creation' but then I thought, hmm...maybe The Sims? I mean it is a simulation...of sorts....
XGVG - One type has three strands of coding, the other four, it's just brilliant, brilliant! And what could possibly go wrong?