Tree Evolution Simulation

[MrEmeraldfusion]

Why are trees "trees" and humans "humans"? In the process of evolution why did plants end up being plants, and trees, and humans becoming humans?

[ZongyiYang]

@MrEmeraldfusion I am no biologist, but here is my best attempt:

Plants and humans are so different because evolution branches out instead of merging together new species (with some exceptions). A long time ago, all life were single celled. Some developed symbiotic relationships with photosynthetic bacteria, while some didn't. The ones that did became plants, the ones that didn't became animals. There is no half man half plant thing because the two branches could not merge after they diverged.

[MrEmeraldfusion]

@ZongyiYang What determined plants to become 'plants' and human to become 'humans'? I understand plants work with mammals and mammals with plants.

[ZongyiYang]

@MrEmeraldfusion Probably random chance. The first cell that ate the photosynthesizing bacteria probably did it by accident. It reproduced and passed on it's bacteria keeping abilities to its children, giving them an advantage because they can harvest sunlight. The ones that could not swallow the bacteria became the animals. Nothing determined or forced them to be like that, it was just luck. If we re-rolled everything, we might not get the same luck and we might just have plantanimal hybrids.

[MrEmeraldfusion]

@ZongyiYang- Doesn't the environment play a factor in change? How did 'seeds evolve' seperately also well? tree cells/fruit cells/human cells? and they all developed separately, but they need each other to survive right?

[ZongyiYang]

@MrEmeraldfusion The environment plays a huge factor, along with stuff like chance. Genetic Drift, like how my trees change colour (sometimes I get red trees, sometimes blue, but it isn't selected for) is chance, Natural Selection is dependent on environment (short trees can live in a forest of short trees, but not in a forest of tall trees).

[ZongyiYang]

@MrEmeraldfusion As for how seeds evolved separately, that is the evolution of multicellular life. By specializing certain cells, like seed cells vs leaf cells, they can work together to create a much more fit organism. It's like an army, you would have the strong guys fight and maybe the smart guys do intel (a simplification), but it wouldn't make sense to have intel guys fighting the front lines.

[ZongyiYang]

@MrEmeraldfusion @MrEmeraldfusion If you are still interested, here is a cool example:

pnas . org/content/early/2012/01/10/1­115323109 . full . pdf

(remove spaces)

They evolved single celled yeast into snowflake organisms by changing the environment. The snowflakes even made "seeds" by breaking off clusters at specific points with special suicide cells. This might be how the first multicell life looked like, although they would probably be simpler bacteria than advanced yeast.

[ZongyiYang]

@MrEmeraldfusion Apparently you can't just copy and paste that link :/ . I don't know why youtube doesn't let me post links. In order to get that link to work, you have to type it out by hand since copying and pasting the last part (1115323109) messes it up.

[mysteriusBhoice]

they used to have a similar game like this up for download where u click folowers cross polinate self polinate stuff like that

[javad150891]

IMPRESSIVE

[Brearos]

You should also use Fibonacci series to branch the tress

[shnosmas]

i have never had so much fun watching grass grow

[wolfbane135]

Fascinating.

[NWOshill]

As a novice programmer who would love to learn how to do this, are there any books you can recommend?

[Terabytekit]

Oh my god this is awesome!

I'd like to ask one question tho. If all trees compete for light by being taller, why are almost all the same height?

Also how long did it take you to write this?

[Ihatemelee]

is there any significance to the subtle color changes in the simulation?

[ZongyiYang]

@Ihatemelee Oh man I haven't logged on to this account for a while now. Anyway, trees like to mate with other trees based on proximity, colour, etc. Trees of drastically different colours have a smaller chance of mating. This causes species with different colours to form. The video only shows a small section of the "world". In the real program, there would be multiple populations in different areas with different colours and shapes because they prefer to mate amongst their own population.

[ZongyiYang]

@Ihatemelee Oh man I haven't logged on to this account for a while now. Anyway, trees like to mate with other trees based on proximity, colour, etc. Trees of drastically different colours have a smaller chance of mating. This causes species with different colours to form. The video only shows a small section of the "world". In the real program, there would be multiple populations in different areas with different colours and shapes. Note that the colours also show genetic drift.

[andywillkillyou]

you should simulate day and night, where the angle of the sun isn't always pointing directly upwards

[ZongyiYang]

@andywillkillyou I don't have night and day, but in some of my simulations, the light source is centralized to the middle of the "world", so the center will get a lot of light while the edges will get only a few light bits. In one of the pictures at the very end of the video, you can see the effect of this, where smaller trees adapt to the lower light conditions at the edges, while bigger tree species take advantage of the abundant light in the middle.

[Alarindris]

When trees grow they don't push existing branches up, they grow from the top/outside. May want to modify that.

[ZongyiYang]

@Alarindris Good idea, but it would be out of my scope of knowledge to program. The physics involved and the collision detection would be hard to write and probably would eat up processor time on this already slow program.

[timonix2]

your trees act more like mushrooms than trees though. But it's really cool to see how it considers the best way to survive to be

[sharpnova2]

would it be possible to get the source for this simulator?

i'd like to see the genome.

what's the purpose of 'junk dna?' is it so junk dna regions can leak over into non-junk regions and provide more chaotic mutability?

[vourok]

could you give us a link to this or something like this?

[Bluebull114]

Very interesting, thank you for sharing. How did you calculate which trees were recieveing less light?

[sharpnova2]

@Bluebull114 surface area and how many trees are blocking the direct light. (used light)

[ArandurKing909]

Source?

[icarus119]

awesomely awesome! try to make more of these type of things. good luck

[DarrenDuddle]

nice program thanks

[keysle]

nice simulation. how long did it take to process?

[kjlg74]

Cool program idea!

[doom032]

I find it interesting how the higher the trees get, the less of them stay alive. Could be a metaphor for a lot of things.

[TheGradiusFan]

download link?

[matty406]

I would really like to play around with this.

[AlexPleaseHelpDotCom]

Very nice work.

Post it to a website!

[shade1978x]

I like the part where he says "This video is sped up." LOL

Yeah, because we don't have a few billion years to sit here and watch it happen in real-time. :D

Great vid, by the way!

[sjh7132]

I think the energy cost of height should be height ^ 2 because you need a stronger base to support a taller structure. I bet this would encourage more branching and a more classical tree.

Cool simulation!

[inarchus]

That's a great idea, and I agree that it would be interesting to see a  non-linear cost for growth. But it's an awesome simulation nonetheless.

[ZongyiYang]

I agree, I did not have any structural simulation in this program so the trunk size was not a factor in the trees success.

I always wanted to have a program that combined my truss program in my other video with this tree program, making trees that would evolve structure. However, thats an idea for another time ;) .

[MrJastin]

I was wating for the trees to come up, then i realized they where at the bottom xD

[samachcha]

nice too

[freedomofspeechfan]

very nice, thought about programming something similar before but unfortunatly I am not a good programmer really. Would be nice if you could make it available as an .exe

[spark300c]

cool

[masteroftime8888]

Kudos man, that had to be awful to program in java (I'm planning on trying something like this in c++)

[ChainMailArmour]

Nice Video! Your good! Takes an awesome programmer to make something do that.

[PaXx]

nice!

[WhiteDragon103]

Epic. You should try a different format for the DNA - one which while may be less accurate to that of real DNA, but one which may produce complex results with fewer generations.