Ecology

Purpose

Ecology describes how discovered patterns distribute across parameter and behavior space.

Terms

parameter space: the coordinate system induced by genotype parameters.
niche: a dense region of parameter-behavior occupancy.
habitat: practical synonym here for a region where similar behaviors persist.
edge of chaos: hypothesis that rich, diverse dynamics cluster near transition regions; this is a framing idea, not yet proven by the current dossier.

Current Quality-Gated Corpus (2026-02-28)

From artifacts/compendium.sqlite (optionally synced to a remote artifact root):

schema version: 4
indexed runs: 7
total indexed creatures: 224
stable creatures: 224
unique genotypes: 224 (unique/rows ratio 1.0000)
taxonomy-assigned rows: 0 (all taxonomy fields null)

Interpretation Limits

This quality-gated corpus has strong intra-regime diversity (non-overlapping seed blocks, no genotype duplication), but it is still a single-regime ecology sample (NNEA-style search only).

What this supports well:

threshold fitting from a clean morphology/ecology population,
method testing for ecology export and PCA wiring,
terminology and concept grounding with stable examples.

What this does not yet support:

multi-habitat niche mapping,
cross-regime ecological band claims,
taxonomy-aware ecology (taxonomy is still unassigned in indexing).

Visual Anchors from This Corpus

Mu-sigma occupancy from the quality-gated corpus (LeniaCLI ecology --plot):

Ecology mu-sigma plot (2026-02-28 quality-gated corpus)

In this plot, each point is one indexed creature projected to:

mu: mean kernel center value (m) across kernels,
sigma: mean kernel width value (s) across kernels.

Slow/meandering exemplar frame:

What Is Still Planned

automated niche labeling and naming,
taxonomy-aware ecological maps,
stronger causal tests for “edge of chaos” claims.

export command contract: ../contracts/EcologyCLI.md
schema contract: ../contracts/CompendiumSchema.md
taxonomy concept: Taxonomy.md