I’m starting a blog/portfolio of my toy projects, and you’re in its first post! The cute little doggie in the photo is Viola, my friend who lives with me. The picture in the front page is a simulation of surnames dying out in a fixed population through a certain number of epochs.

The simulation works by creating a population with each entity having a unique id, then for a certain number of iterations, we permute these values and take the first half as those who keep their surnames and the other half as those who adopt the other half’s surname. With this setup the number of surnames rapidly decrease. The surnames were then taken and normalised, being used as a heatmap, which produces the following image:

Then to achieve the visual effect of a gradient I sort the surnames at each generation, which gives the banner image:

It also helps to sort these values when visualising how the population dies out, by assigning each id with a random color instead of a gradient:

This blog is made using Gatsby with the HeroBlog starter by Greg Lobinsky. If you’re seeing this, Greg, thank you for the starter!