[MUD-Dev] ... forests and ecologies.

[Mike Sellers]

At 10:48 PM 11/29/97 PST8PDT, Ling wrote:
>Okay, today's stupid question:  Forests!  How do they start?  I mean,
>seriously!  I've always lived in rurban areas, and the forests near me
>seem to have been pruned a bit.  Do forests really start off with a wall
>of trees?  Does nature define a sharp boundary in Her mysterious ways?

The "wall of trees" is a human-created phenomenon, from when people have
cleared forests for farmland or roads.  In more natural circumstances, the
boundaries between terrain types is usually much more gradual -- grasslands
with a few trees here and there, and then there are small copses of trees,
then larger groups, and pretty soon it's all a big forest.  This is true
whether the forest is expanding and the copses are outliers, or whether the
forest is dying back and the copses are the last hardy outposts of its
former extent.  

As for how forests _start_, that's a complex question that's beyond me.  I
think it probably has as much to do with evolution and climate as anything
else... I suspect giant forests change in climatological if not geological
time.  

>Also, today, I read a really interesting article in the NewScientist about
>ecologies and how, sometimes, introducing a creature with better
>attributes to a new environment won't necessarily mean the creature will
>thrive.  It's all to do with webs, heavy independencies between species
>and how it parallels with the business world.  I haven't drawn any
>conclusions from it but it seemed interesting at the time and almost
>applicable to muds in some ways...

This is an extremely interesting area for me, and it seems to be perfect
for mud 'research.'  If you like this sort of thing, you should definitely
read the book _At Home in the Universe_ by Stuart Kauffman (think that's
the right spelling).  One of the things that I believe is semi-consciously
frustrating to many players is the lack of webbed interdependencies
(ecological, economic, societal, political) in mud-worlds.  It can be
difficult to set up and keep such relationships relatively stable, but it
can also, I believe, create a much more satisfying world.  

FWIW, Kauffman proposes that most living systems exist on what he calls
"the edge of chaos", where change is dynamic but not overly chaotic.  This
can be likened to the area of the phase space where the temperature and
pressure are just right so that water is forming into ice and back into
water equally, so it is balanced on a razor's edge: move a bit to one side,
and all becomes ice -- locked in permanent stability where nothing really
changes (like most muds); move a bit to the other side, all stability fades
away, and all relationships become of ultra-short duration with only local
effect (as seen socially in short-span games like Doom and perhaps even
UO).  Walking is a good example of living on the edge of chaos: every step
we take is really just semi-controlled falling.  If we miss a step, we fall
flat on our faces.  And yet we're able to control the chaos of falling just
enough, without retreating into the plant-like stability of never moving,
such that we are able to actually move forward in a non-random fashion.  

>This is it, in my own words:  If your mud ecology/food chain/supply chain
>can be corrupted by adding a few entities a few factors more 'powerful'
>than the existing ones, then there's something wrong. (that's not what the
>article says, that's me being me)

To some degree I agree.  Most stable systems are also brittle: introduce a
new variable and things go all haywire.  Systems that are more flexible,
more close to 'living' systems, tend to be in continual, dynamic,
homeostatic equilibrium (like the water molecules moving from water to ice
and ice to water at the same rate, or like your heart rate increasing with
activity, but not linearily with it).  Such systems tend to deal with the
introduction of new factors more easily than do more brittle ones; things
may change, but not instantly, discontinuously, or without recourse.  For
example, introducing a great new predator into an area typically won't mean
that that predator will "take over" the area -- even it is governed by its
food supply, how it disposes of its waste, what can decompose it, what its
life-cycle patterns are, etc.  Each of these limit how "effective" the new
creature can be in the environment (despite what the "Alien" movies tell us
:) ).  

This is the kind of thing I'd love to see more of in muds.  Back to work. :)

Mike Sellers                                    Chief Alchemist
mike at online-alchemy.com                         Online Alchemy              

        Combining art & science to create new worlds.