[MUD-Dev] Re: MURKLE: Wot it is

[Chris Gray]

[J C Lawrence:]

:Translation:  It took about 30 minutes for the first TC population
:explosion to occur.  20 minutes later they all died of starvation.
:Within a couple days the entire world was knee deep in TC spores.  
:
:TC's need an effective predator which has its own cyclic population
:behaviour (needs to be dependant on TC population, but enough
:out-of-step to prevent steady-states from occuring).  

Sounds similar to the old "sharks and fish" simulation. It was in the
Mathematical Games section of Scientific American some years ago. I recall
from playing that a friend and I did that you can tune the various parameters
to keep things going for quite a long time.

For those who don't recall it, it was something like this:

- a steady supply of plankton falls from the sky. This is implemented as
    food dots appearing randomly over the display area.

- fish swim around randomly, and eat food dots they encounter. If they go
    over a certain length of time without food, they die of starvation. If
    they are over a certain age, and the amount of food eaten recently is
    over another tunable value, they reproduce - yielding one new fish. If
    a fish detects a shark in one of 8 immediately neighbouring cells, it
    will try to move away from it (not always possible, but the world is
    the usual rectangular torus thingy).

- sharks are a lot like fish, except that they have separate parameters for
    their starvation, maturity and reproduction values. If they see a fish
    in one of the neighbouring cells, they will move to that cell on their
    next turn. If they enter a cell with a fish, they eat it.

(I may have some details wrong - its been a while.)

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA


--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.