Erosis - Just When You Think Everything is Normal

I was putzing around SL. On this night, that meant typing random words into the Search function and visiting whatever pops up. I ended up at a little location by the name of, Erosis, in the Ungnyo sim. When I say it was a strange experience, I say it fondly. Description from owner Senuka Harbinger reads "A-Life fish, 1 prim knots, strange mass experiments, and general use park." That says it all, doesn't it?

The 2048 square meter location sported some trance tunes, a rotating, snake-like texture, a rotating globe and a school of AI fish. Colors abounded and the music thumped in the back of my head. TP up to an interesting walkway in the sky to get to the globe. Find the school of fish in the pond. Take a gander at my snapshots. These tiny oases of imagination are what give SL its character for me.

A little snipet of a more in-depth notecard made available next to the pond containing Harbinger's A-Life fish school:

The predators in my system (sharks) are fairly easy to program behaviour; when they're hungry they eat (using the exact same program is the fish use for finding food, only they eat fish instead), and when they are full they swim around idly.

My system does have a renewable food source; fish pellets. I made them invisible to reduce the client-side visual lag, but they are still there. An estimated 1 food every 9 seconds added to the lake is enough to support an aquarium of this size for about 9 fish.

I had coded in an evolutionary segment to allow the fish to adapt priorties, swim speeds, energy till birth, etc. based off how sucessful a fish was determined by how long it lived; on average the fish in this tank live for 500 seconds. fish that live for 500 seconds have their genes within 95% of the value that allowed them to live that long. fish that live longer have an even closer margin for errer, with a 99.98% accuracy if a fish lives to be 1000 seconds. fish that live for very short periods of time have a much larger variance in their genes, up to 50% if the fish was eaten immediately after birth.

The Globe

View from the Top

TP object

AI Fish School