Teeth Deck

About this model

This diagram simulates a dynamic ecosystem model involving predator-prey interactions and the ripple effects through a food chain represented by variable types of fish. The system initiates with various pools symbolizing different entities within an ecosystem such as "Teeth Deck," "Prey," "Predator," and different tiers of fish ("Fish," "Bigger Fish," and "Biggest Fish"), along with a "Reshuffle" mechanism. Each entity type interacts with others through a series of resource and state connections, designed to emulate the biological and environmental processes that dictate survival, predation, and the transfer of energy within an ecological community.

The intricate web of interactions is modeled to reflect the consequences of events like death, predation, and reshuffling on the ecosystem's structure. Predators consume prey, leading to adjustments across the system, such as adding resources ("Teeth") to a collective pool ("Teeth Deck") or causing specific entities like fish to evolve into more significant forms or go extinct, mimicking natural selection and evolutionary pressures. Reshuffling events introduce randomness, simulating unexpected environmental changes. The system's goal is to reach a stable state where the deck has achieved a predetermined configuration, indicative of a balanced ecosystem, and to track the number of turns (iterative steps) required to reach this equilibrium, offering insights into the efficiency and resilience of the ecological model designed.

“Teeth Deck” is a diagram in the Machinations Community by kevincroberson.

You can open the original diagram in the Machinations app, press Play to watch how resources move through it, and change its values to see how the system responds. Machinations is a visual tool for designing, simulating and balancing game economies and other systems, where resources flow through sources, pools, drains, converters and gates. In a diagram, a source creates resources, a pool stores them, a drain removes them, a converter changes one resource into another and a gate decides where they go next.