Wa-Tor is an old ecological simulation from the 80’s, and one of the things that got me interested in programming, ecology and artificial life, which led on to my MSc. It visualises a toroidal sea - a torus is a really useful shape because it doesn’t have edges - with sharks and fish; the fish roam around and breed; the sharks hunt the fish, starve if they don’t feed, and breed if they do.
It’s a very simple model with 3 outcomes - the sharks all die of hunger and the fish take over the world; the sharks eat all the fish and then all die of hunger; or a balance is found, with sharks increasing, hunting the fish, running out of food, starving back to low numbers, with the fish then recovering and starting the cycle again.
