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Annie Spinster

ambient_light is a virtual ecosystem containing a number of classes of organism. The creatures form a complex food web with interactions between individuals leading to emergent properties such as flocking and population cycles.

Driving the system is a store of energy points which flow through the food web affecting many of the creatures' local variables and so their appearance and behaviour, before being eventually returned to the environment through death and metabolism. The energy points behave as a catalyst to facilitate interactions and reactions between individuals.

The work is called ambient_light because of the way the background reacts to everything that happens within the environment. These reactions are not really emergent properties as such - they are more like visual clues to hidden emergent patterns in the overall flow of energy.

Although everything that happens in ambient_light is entirely deterministic, the narrative plays out differently each time the programme is run. There are so many possible configurations of causal events that it is impossible to predict exactly what will happen each time. There are, however, noticeable patterns in the overall flow of the system – points of stability and instability.

Within this tangled web of contingencies, some events, for example symbiosis, appear so improbable, when viewed as the product of a causal chain, that it is difficult to believe they could ever happen at all. The multiple instances of each species of organism, the tiny differences between individuals of the same species and the ever-changing local conditions for each creature all spread the chances of an event happening.

For instance: in order for the parasite to enter the system there must be a spore cloud lined up with some falling dying matter, which must be eaten by an omnivore larva, which must reach adulthood at the right stage of the insects’ periodic lifecycle. The insects must catch and bite the infected omnivore and then bite other organisms before the parasite has any chance of establishing a population. It seems nearly impossible that this exact set of circumstances could ever occur.

However, not all of these conditions are equally unlikely. Should the chain of contingency stretch as far as the simultaneous presence of infected omnivores and hatched insects, the insects will almost definitely bite the omnivore and then bite another creature, because of their complex food preferences. Other conditions, such as the omnivore larva becoming infected, only need happen once for a long-lasting opportunity to arise. Given enough time for individual creatures, with all their individual differences, to grow, feed, multiply and die, the parasite is fairly likely to establish itself in the system. From this point it has a roughly 50/50 chance of causing mass extinction before the ecosystem regenerates itself, seeking out new points of balance.