Where can I learn more about this?
The paper associated with this site is probably a good starting point. It is currently available in
preprint form and is currently under review at a journal.
If you want to know more than that, contact me! I love
talking about this stuff.
What settings did you use in the paper?
The settings used in the paper are the defaults on this page. I chose them somewhat arbitrarily and am
currently working on characterizing them more systematically.
Why doesn't the paper discuss what happens when you iterate time forward?
A few reasons. Most importantly, there are page limits and we were already trying to cram in a lot.
Additionally, I'm still getting a feel for what patterns exist in the behavior of these communities
when you iterate them forward. Those buttons are mostly here so I could re-assure myself (and others)
that selection doesn't do anything crazy that would have implications for how I should interpret the
behavior of randomly generated communities.
There's something wrong with this website/I have a feature request
Great! Thanks for letting me know! You can send bugs and feature requests by
making an issue on GitHub (or contacting me some other way, if that's easier for you).
I want to help with this research!
Fantastic! Send me an e-mail and we can talk
about collaboration. This is a huge topic and I'm just one person, so I welcome help.
What tools did you use to build this?
For full details, see the GitHub repo for this site. In summary, though, I used:
Empirical: Using the Empirical library I was able to easily create two versions of the code for this project:
a fast one for research, and this interactive one for playing with ideas and sharing with others. I wrote the whole thing in C++ and compiled the research version
normally. This interactive version was compiled to highly efficient Javascript using the Emscripten compiler.
Bootstrap: an open source web framework, which I used to make this website.
Open Iconic: open source icons which I used for the buttons on this site.
And of course my trusty laptop running
Linux Mint.
Who else helped make this happen?
I'm very grateful to my collaborators, Charles Ofria
and Wolfgang Banzhaf, and to
the MSU Digital Evolution Lab for
their input on this project and their work on the Empirical library, without which this
site would not exist.
Who are you?
I'm a PhD student at Michigan State University studying evolution, ecology, and computer science. To learn more about my research, see my website.