The synthetic ecosystem appears to be running fine. I'm not sure what I'll name it, but I want the name to be interesting. I've discovered that calling the carnivores "tigers" and the herbivores "cows" makes it more interesting to me, for some strange reason. I've also arbitrarily designated each turn a "week". The simulation took about 7 hours to age around 450 years. At the current rate, my plan for about 200,000 years of evolution ain't gonna happen. I have plenty of ways I can speed up the program, so I fear I will have to stop it and try again.
In any event, no evolved strain of Tiger has survived more than five generations and no strain of Cow has survived for more than three. I think I'll let it run for another day or two while I tweak another copy. Right now, the console IO is probably the drag. I've thought about using some Inline::C to speed things up but I discarded that idea pretty rapidly. I want this to be pure Perl so that other Perl programmers will eventually be able to hack on it.
