Jay McGavren's Journal

Life simulation ideas...

Just watched the Nature episode “Born Wild: The First Days of Life”, and got a dangerously large number of ideas for an artificial life simulation.

Here are (some of) the forces that seem to be in play:

• Food and energy affect all aspects of birthing strategies. All these make it more likely at least some young will survive, but take energy in return:
• Producing more than one fetus.
• Long gestation periods.
• Making yolk inside eggs.
• Producing milk.
• If you're not top of the food chain, your babies need to be born ready to run. A longer gestational period is in order.
• A baby can be left to fend for itself, if it's born smart enough to find food. This means no milk production or babysitting, but probably also means longer gestation.
• Birds let the strongest infant feed first - it's most likely to survive. The others get the scraps and if they live too, great. Sometimes the strongest sibling kills the weaker ones. Sometimes the parents themselves do.
• If the father stays to help, it brings extra food energy into the equation - he feeds the kids or sometimes the mother. Sometimes this means bigger litters, or in the case of emperor penguins, it simply means survival.
• Sometimes the mother herself is the food energy - one species of spider willingly lets the babies eat her alive.
• For males, killing the cubs of your rivals is a good way to get their harems ready to mate with you. Of course, you have to prove your genetic superiority by fighting off the father first.
• Social animals help defend each others' young, IF they're from the same father. Children from other groups get attacked, though.

Ruby on Acid: YAML says it all...

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Hi-res Ruby On Acid wallpapers...

Went back and re-rendered some of my favorites at 1080p resolution (should scale down to widescreen monitors nicely).

Ruby on Acid: ConstantGenerator...

It seems obvious, in retrospect, that a little stability was needed with all this randomness…

@f.factory_pool << RubyOnAcid::ConstantFactory.new(rand)

In the image below, one of the Y coordinates is hooked up to a ConstantGenerator whose get_unit() always returns 0.5, hence, always halfway down the screen.

Similarly:

This is an XSD example from a normally stodgy tutorial site; were they trying for innuendo?

<xs:complexType name="jeans">
  <xs:simpleContent>
    <xs:extension base="size">
      <xs:attribute name="sex">