Plants

This is a long running (multiple weeks if uninterrupted, or until the machine crashes or I decide to fiddle with the parameters) program that grows "plants" and then rewards them as they compete for "sunlight". Every hundred timesteps (generations) the plants are dumped to a pov format file as they "grow" in the simulated "garden". There are several such "gardens" on each timestep (in order to keep the runtime from becoming even more hideous than it already is). Every hour or so these files are rendered by povray at 1000x1000 resolution, converted to thumbnails and listed in this file.

There are several subpages linked from here. Each is a different run of the system with varying parameters.

Someday when I have some more computing resources (mostly more memory, or a couple of extra processors) I'll actually change things around in here to make it more like a physical model of plants. That involves changing the physics of how plants "stand up" a bit and would also involve handing sunlight better. Until then I'm just seeing what happens.

The current run.

• First The first run of this on this machine.
• Second On this run I was playing with using a discontinuous penalty function for the triangles. The triangles are too big for my taste, so I changed the penalty function for the next run.
• Yet Another Run On this run the penalty function was more or less like that in the previous run, but with a lower penalty for stems to encourage things to grow higher.
• More! Again, a bit of fiddling with the penalty function. Not enough triangles for my taste though.
• A short run The power died and the poor computer was not on a UPS.
• a middlin' run
• another short run with the probability of turns increased
• another short run like the previous one but the machine was rebooted somewhere in there

For more information, or for the source code, see the sourceforge project page .