Purpose
The Population Simulator makes model breeding visible. It turns mutation rate, selection pressure, carrying capacity, diversity, and retirement into a local experiment that can be run in the browser.
The point is not to predict a real model population. The point is to build intuition: too little variation stagnates; too little selection clutters; too little diversity creates a narrow ecology; a useful no-op preserves the current champion.
Controls to teach
| Control | What it represents | What visitors learn |
|---|---|---|
| Mutation rate | How far descendants move from parents. | Variation must be large enough to explore but bounded enough to evaluate. |
| Selection pressure | How strongly evidence affects survival. | Fitness evidence shapes the active population. |
| Carrying capacity | How many active artifacts the ecology can maintain. | Frugal systems cannot keep everything active. |
| Specialist bonus | Reward for niche excellence. | A narrow model can be valuable even if it is not a global winner. |
| Diversity bonus | Reward for coverage. | Useful diversity prevents a single pattern from dominating every niche. |
| Release threshold | Evidence needed before active use. | Release packets turn experiments into adoption-ready improvements. |
| Retirement threshold | Value needed to stay active. | Retirement keeps the ecology lean while preserving lineage. |
Suggested classroom exercise
Run the simulator three times: once with high mutation, once with high selection, once with high diversity. Compare the final champion, specialist count, and archived branches. Then ask which configuration better matches a legal assistant, a coding assistant, and a local telemetry assistant.
Population pressure simulator
Run a deterministic toy model of mutation, scoring, diversity, no-op, and retirement. This is explanatory, not predictive.
Run the simulation to see the generation summary.
Source reports used for this guide
These reports are preserved verbatim in the site archive. The guide above is an editorial synthesis and may narrow, qualify, or reorganize claims from the source material.