Natural evolution can be modeled as a game, in which the rewards for an organism that plays a good game of life are the passing on of its genetic material to its successors and its continued survival. In natural evolution, how well an individual performs depends on its who it works with and who it competes with, as well as the environment. Genetic algorithms are a simulation of natural selection on a population of candidate solutions to an optimization problem (chromosomes, individuals, creatures, or phenotypes).