Ecological Succession Simulation

🪶 Ecological Succession Simulator

Grammar evolves over epochs as word “species” colonize, dominate, and go extinct. Early = bare syntax; late = complex subordinate structures.

Epochs/second Speciation prob Extinction prob Mutation (morph)

Initial species Max sentences / epoch Random seed

Show annotations

---

epoch: 0

species: 0

richness: 0

diversity H′: 0.00

stage: early

Tip: “Speciation” adds new words; “Extinction” removes rare ones; “Mutation” perturbs morphology & Markov transitions. Turn on Show annotations to see exactly how each epoch’s text was built.

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How to read what you’re seeing

This simulator turns an ecology of word species into text using a POS (part-of-speech) Markov chain. Here’s how each knob maps to the output you see:

Stage badge [early] [mid] [late]
Early favors skeleton phrases like DET N V → shorter, declarative lines. Mid/Late gradually allow REL + C (that/which/and/because), so you’ll see longer clauses and subordination.

Speciation probability
Higher ➜ more new content words (N/ADJ/V/ADV) enter the pool. You’ll notice novel compounds like after-seed or ledger-star in later epochs.

Extinction probability
Higher ➜ rare species get culled. Output becomes sparser and repeats a smaller vocabulary; diversity (H′) drops.

Mutation (morphology)
Perturbs the POS transition matrix and morphs content words only. Function words (the/and/that/can…) are locked to prevent glue like afterthis. Expect hyphenated compounds and small vowel flips.

Richness & Diversity H′
Richness = number of active species; H′ (Shannon) measures balance. As both rise, lines tend to lengthen and vary syntactically.

Show annotations
When checked, each epoch prints a faint line like:
epoch 12 · stage mid · +2 spec, −1 extinct · skeletons: DET ADJ N V P DET N . | PRO AUX V ADV .
That tells you exactly which templates were used and what ecological changes occurred that produced the lines above it.

Recipes

• Bare syntax field: raise Extinction, lower Speciation, low Mutation → clipped declaratives with repeated nouns/verbs.
• Climax forest: lower Extinction, raise Speciation & Mutation → subordinate clauses, relative pronouns, compounds proliferate.
• Disturbance event: run rich/late, then briefly spike Extinction to “burn” the lexicon; watch secondary succession rebuild variety.

Under the hood: we sample POS skeletons by stage, then pick concrete tokens with probability proportional to each species’ abundance. Abundance drifts (winners grow, others decay), while speciation/extinction add and remove species every epoch.