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Julian Vincent wrote: > There is, of course, masses of information on territory and competition for > space amongst both plants and animals. But how much of it involves > optimisation? I suppose a climax community has more organisms and species per > unit area, and presumably this represents some sort of optimisation, but how > to quantify this? Do members of a particular species live longer / reproduce > more / have fewer diseases when in a climax community rather than a > sub-climactic one? Is that really the criterion for optimisation? What are > you trying to optimise? I think there is a theory that, in savannah-type predator/prey encounters, the prey species optimizes its chance of survival by minimizing the area of its Voronoi territory in the Voronoi diagram of it and the predators. That's as may be; but the real point I wanted to make is that there has been a lot of work on stochastic computational geometry centered round (if that's the phrase...) Voronoi diagrams, and things like Shepard-Kruskal scaling in the social sciences. There is not very much biomimetic here (unless Sociology is a branch of Biology, which---what with all these beady-eyed neo-Darwinists tending to dominate the niche population---I guess it is these days...) - it's mainly statistical, but the work may well be worth looking at in space allocation. Yours Adrian -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Adrian Bowyer | Senior Lecturer | e-mail: [log in to unmask] Department of Mechanical Engineering | web: www.bath.ac.uk/~ensab University of Bath | phone: +44 1225 826826 Bath BA2 7AY | fax: +44 1225 826928 U.K. | -------------------------------------------------------------------- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%