I started off playing with as many different models as I had time for. I particularly liked the virus model, but couldn't think of anything interesting to do with it.
Eventually I tried out the mimicry simulation. It was fairly easy to grasp what was going on and the results were interesting.
However, the simulation relied upon asexual reproduction. I wondered whether the simulation would hold up if I modified the reproduction model to approximate a simple sexual version. To do this, I took the existing behavior for birds eating butterflies (i.e. a butterfly checks around it for birds, potentially gets eaten) and switched it to if there is a butterfly of the same species nearby, mate with it. I also reduced the number of butterflies allowed in a population in order to make it easier to see.
Unfortunately, this had disastrous results for the viceroy moths.
I realized this was due to the reproduction chance still being set to 4% as was pertinent when the population was reproducing asexually. I bumped this to a whopping 50% (not truly realistic, considering the small percentage of insects that survive to adulthood in a real-world situation) and watched as the same result of the original simulation unfolded.
No comments:
Post a Comment