![]() I realize I may have blinded people with science. a few possible lessons:ġ) We might be undergoing a rapid growth spurt (lots of relatively new members)Ģ) We might be struggling to retain members (a lack of people sticking around after 3yrs)ģ) That committed core (willing to stick around forever) would be on the small size. It's hard to interpret this data in isolation but. This data is pretty rough, but interesting (I added up the account ages for 51 members on recent topics on the forums) Seeing as no data has turned up, I realized we might get a snap shot of the health of the community by looking at it's age distribution (i.e. The point at which Minetest becomes of near zero relevance to anyone beyond those few survivors. What I mean is practically extinct (remember practically infinite?!!). Obviously 1 copy of the game, or a small committed core could go on. Talking about "extinction" I was simplifying. It makes sense to me that we could we could apply some science to the Minetest community! you can talk about a population of Jelly Beans and apply science to that (extremely high death rates, very sad!). mostly controlled by immigration/emmigration rather than births/deaths. Obviously we are a weird population (or cluster of populations) compared with say, sheep on an island e.g. But without the data I have no way of knowing if this is the case.ĭoes anyone have the facts about the matter? So it struck me, there is at least the possibility that we are too small to be sustainable in the long-run. I saw in the "Is Minetest too Small" debate the question "Too small for what?" I personally do not "feel" like Minetest is at risk of imminent collapse. Perhaps if this community collapses one day, Minetest could indeed be reborn. Thankfully software is free from these laws of population dynamics. Updates would be less frequent, potentially of lower quality. Even minimum size effects.īelow a certain scale we would lose the ability to maintain servers, old mods, etc. Us, you and me, the ability of this population of human beings, and it's associated structure of servers and additional Minetest related content, to survive.Īs we are a population of human beings, we are subject to the same laws of nature as any population on planet earth. ![]() What I was looking for was information on Minetest-the-community. ![]() It is self-evident that Minetest-the-game can survive even if one person has a copy. My apologies for not making myself clear. The difference between reincarnation and survival: Randomextinctiongraph.PNG (19.46 KiB) Viewed 152 times People forget that surprises are surprising!ġ) Have we got the data? How many active participants do we have? What are the trends, the fluctuations etc?Ģ) Is our self-organization working at our current scale? Would it work better with more people?ģ) What might out minimum viable size be?Ĥ) How close to the minimum are we? Are we in the danger zone?ĥ) What are some potential disasters we face? Would we survive them?Ħ) What are we going to do to avoid the dangers of being too small? In fact we can never know what the biggest run of bad (or good) luck could be. mvp is unknown (we might be able to make a good guess of it though) It's a minimum size thing: too small and the self-organization become dysfunctional. As I learnt making my Self-organizing Systems mods, these mechanisms work better with larger numbers (we are a bit like the Eusocial Bot in Ecobots). sometimes the population grows, sometimes it instantly crashes, but in all cases the risk remains - unless it escapes the danger zone.Ĭollaborative projects like ours work by self-organization. Playing with this gives you a very good feel for the effects of randomness. If it goes below 50 the population crashes to zero. That is, the initial population (B2) gets randomly changed up or down by 10 with each time step. If you want to try it yourself use this formula: This is an extremely simple model in excel, but shows the basic principles. ![]() A run of bad luck can make it go below mvp. Although it seems to be doing fine, it is at risk. This is a population which is too close to it's minimum size (50). The risk of unpredictable spontaneous extinction. + or - 100 individuals every year.įor small populations this results in a huge danger: Below this you enter a death spiral and crash to extinction. a minimum viable population size (mvp). To explain, a crash course in population science!Įvery population has two features (among others): Decide what we can do to exit/stay away from the danger zone. - Discover if we are in the danger zone.I think it deserves some more rigorous discussion than the "Too Small" debate usually gets. I've been reading the latest incarnation of the "Is Minetest too small" debate.
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