About bioCity

Introduction

What is this bioCity anyway? You're probably wondering that if you just stumbled across this page without warning. bioCity is a free software program that simulates populations, creating virtual organisms and letting them live and interact in space. It is designed as a tool for ecologists and other interested parties as a complementary technique to analytic methods in population biology.

bioCity currently is a 2-dimensional continuous space and discrete time simulation. It starts when the program creates virtual organisms on a rectangle. It looks something like this when displayed:

The program proceeds in timesteps. The start is time t=0. At each timestep, each organism may move, reproduce, or die, and what these organisms do are based on a collection of rules called a scenario. Each scenario has to be programmed and is generally done by the bioCity team. Most users will probably want to focus on changing the parameters of each scenario. Much flexibility in the scenario rules allow you to explore many different rules.

The organisms will behave in these different ways and you are able to see what the total population at different timesteps. Currently you can see the population every 20 timesteps, although in the next release you will be able to configre it.

It was written and is copyrighted by me, Jason Polák. I started coding it for the final project in my "Mathematical Modeling In Ecology and Evolution" class at the University of Ottawa. Of course, this statement in no way implies any level of quality of the program, and is not intended to be taken as such ;)

Help Wanted

Currently bioCity is in "beta" status, and it needs lots of work.

Right now it is not intended for rigorous use. It still needs to be thoroughly checked for correctness (that's what the "Test Cases" section is all about), and it needs to be studied and improved. I am looking for volunteers as well to work on this project, and the following sections will explain some areas in which I could use a hand.

• Programmer: If anyone is interested in helping me program, you'll need to have a good knowledge of C++ or else be willing to try and compile it for various systems.
• Biologist: Anyone who is interested in population biology in general can help by making suggestions.

License

bioCity is licensed under the GPL Version 3.

The 32x32 icons here are from the Tango Desktop Project. The logo was made in Inkscape and the website in Vim.