SPECTER LABS

Morphometrics and Trait Policy

Purpose

Defines the morphology surface used by compendium indexing and downstream ecology/warehouse analysis.

Scope:

  • what is computed today,
  • what is stored in creatures.morphometrics_json,
  • what remains in policy or planning.

Inputs

Available per creature:

  • SimulationMetrics (path, displacement, mass stats, occupancy, energy, speed, gyration, center velocity, optional complexity).
  • optional ActivitySummary time series (speciesCount, diversity, eac, ean) when activity JSONL is present.

Implemented Morphometrics (v1)

Method metadata written by indexer:

  • morphometrics_method = "lenia-swarm:morphometrics"
  • morphometrics_version = 1

Fields currently computed:

  • pathTortuosity = pathLength / displacement when displacement > 1e-6, else null.
  • movementEfficiency = displacement / pathLength when pathLength > 1e-6, else null.
  • activitySpeciesMax = max(speciesCount) when activity exists.
  • activitySpeciesStd = std(speciesCount) when activity exists.
  • activityDiversityStd = std(diversity) when activity exists.
  • activityEacMax = max(eac) when activity exists.
  • activityEanMax = max(ean) when activity exists.

If activity summaries are missing, all activity* morphometric fields are null.

Invariants and Caveats

  • Expected geometric invariant: pathLength >= displacement.
  • When only two samples exist, pathLength == displacement is expected and does not imply a bug.
  • Tortuosity distributions are only meaningful when recordings include enough temporal samples.

Trait Policy (Planned)

Trait labels (for example mover, wanderer, swarm, complex) are not yet first-class stored outputs.

Current status:

  • the indexer stores raw morphometrics, not discrete trait labels.

When trait labels become first-class, we will persist:

  • trait method name,
  • trait version,
  • threshold-set identifier (for reproducibility).

Analysis Workflow

The supported CLI surface is LeniaCLI analyze ecology, which exports parameter-space embeddings and summary artifacts from the canonical compendium.