Aliens: things they didn't ought to have done

>>This is an interesting conversation, Keith
>>(and it distracts me from the fact I'm still in the office @ 9pm on a
>>Friday, and I should be working... more about that below...).
>
> What??? You should be drinking by now!

Well, I did have a couple of beers, but that hardly counts as "drinking" in
the way I consider the term. I had a mate finishing her previous
engagement @ 11:30pm, and I was going to catch up with her for a session,
but it occurred to me I had to work today, and can't have a hangover, so
just went home instead :-S


Now, I said I was going to expand on why I was working so late on Friday
(and indeed back in at sparrow's fart today).

The company (err: not "The Company"!) has seen fit to send me over to the
UK next week - for 3-6 months - provided I get my current block of work
finished ready for beta testing on Monday, finished on Wednesday. So
that's quite cool.


> But I wasn't comparing our method to theirs. I was comparing their
> two methods to *each other* when I called the original inefficient.
> Sorry if I didn't make that clear the first time around.

No, I got that. I was just trying to demonstrate it's not much of an
inefficiency.


> Maybe I'm missing the math here. Can you use the population of
> Hadley's Hope as your example?

Nono, I am. Well I'm not, I just didn't bother to think you didn't
actually have my numbers in front of you to look at.

Obviously in my examples, I'm using a timeline as the critical basis of
comparison. In one example, the resources run out on day x; in the other,
it's x+1. But - yes - in that time, there would be almost one more whole
cycle of propagation of the "only uses one resource" variety of alien, so
there would indeed be twice as many aliens by the time the last day
finished.

If resources are limited, the one-at-a-time version get one more cycle, and
there ends up with being almost twice the popluation.

So taking 157 as the benchmark, not six billion, I get this:

System 1 (each alien takes one or two humans per day, resulting in one more
alien each):
@2:
Resources run out on day 7. Between 32 and 64 aliens.

@1
Resources run out on day 8. Between 64 and 128 aliens.

I've lost the figures for the version with the attrition rate, but it'd be
similar.

But with limited resources, all we end up with is aliens without any means
of propagating. Just more of them. At that point it doesn't matter if
there's one or a million of them.


If the resources aren't limited, then it's never an issue, and there's
always the same number of aliens.

I guess more intelligent figures would have the resources multiplying @
some rate too; but realistically, the resources are never going to multiply
fast enough to keep up with the aliens, and the differences would be
trivial. Even if the resources *did* breed like rabbits.

Anyway, I gotta get this work done...

--

Adam

> Now.... *sheep* on the other hand....

Get yer eyes off my sheep!

--

Adam