Posted by The Rumbling God on July 27, 2003 at 07:25:19:
In Reply to: Re: Ways to include SPECIATION :) posted by David on July 27, 2003 at 06:38:45:
One could determine from where the user connects to the internet. I don't know the exact technical possibilities, but perhaps one subset for .com users, another for .org etc.
Perhaps I then could be single ruler of the .se island!
: This is a really, really interesting idea. I had thought about mechanisms for speciation, but hadn't really considered the idea that a subset of the audience is, in a way, like an ecological niche. So how to evolve an organism that exploits a particular niche?
: I really like your idea of the simple psych tests. Although what I would probably do is offer people some different poems or short verses to choose from. But then rather than manually divide the population, I would let exploitation of these psychological divisions be something that could evolve on its own. I've mentioned my pheremone & prefrerence mask mechanism in other posts; if the "pheremone" variable instead were related to the preferences of the viewer...
: Does that make sense? What I want to avoid is any manual intervention, and let evolution find the best mechanisms.
: --David
:
: : I probably wasn't clear with that last bit - I meant that if a poem was voted for by a certain category of people then it would then be allowed to mate with poems also voted for by people in that category (by category I mean a "yellow, circle and summer" person or a "Blue, triangle and winter" person)
: : MikeL
: :
: : : A common topic on these discussion pages is that of speciation - and how there is no mechanism for it. Different poems are randomly interbred with each other. However, in real life individuals in different species cannot interbreed. Speciation occurs when individuals of the same species are separated by location, and gradually become so different that they can no longer breed.
: : : I mentioned a while back about a method by which you could generate speciation via the creation of different *geographies*. My suggestion involved people providing some info about themselves before voting. That way poems that appeal to certain kinds of people will be more successful in certain "locations" (groups of people with similar tastes)
: : : The problem with this idea is the simple fact that people aren't going to provide info they see as personal.
: : : The latest idea I had was to conduct a simple test before the voter starts voting - like certain physchology tests you see around: Ask for a favourite colour, shape & time of year (or any other of those silly questions), and if the answers have any correlation to the type of person they are (they usually do) then you have a multitude of different environments that different poems may do well in.
: : : Each poem could be voted on by all people - the equivalent of species migration - but only allowed to mate with other successful poems in its own "location"
: : : Any thoughts?
: : : MikeL