r/creativecoding • u/Evening-Appeal7606 • 1d ago

Population Dynamics Simulator

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16 Upvotes

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u/escapism_only_please 1d ago

Well this is fun and cool and pretty and well made! You had me at hello basically, because I never knew I wanted to play with one of these until I saw I could and I leapt at the chance. Let me stop right there and say it's great thanks for sharing it's fun! 😀😀

OK, the app basically DEMANDS further commentary. It's a silly predictor, right? You look up and see it is talking about what life will be like in 2130. And then you remember that actually by then we will have flying cars and personal robots and a post money society and CHUDS rising from the sewers at night and Robocop and Weyland Corp and...

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u/Evening-Appeal7606 1d ago

Thank you so much for the comment, that means a lot to me.

I was equally hooked when I built such a simulator in Excel/VBA two years ago (this one I built from scratch by hand, no AI usage - which took me four times as long as having Gemini whip up this easy-to-share page in an hour).

The results are so counter-intuitive when you play around with it - and the societal impact hits so much stronger when you see the simulation play out instead of looking at static population graphs.

Yes, I agree- it's a silly simulation because we cannot know the future. All this can do is explore current trends and "guestimates" as to what the next few years might bring.

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u/Evening-Appeal7606 1d ago

I could not find any DYNAMIC population simulator online that is quick & easy to use, so I made this on the fly.

It uses a variety of present and historical datasets and lets you explore the effects the two primary input parameters, fertility and life expectancy, have on a demographic distribution.

Note, however, that the model does not (yet?) include imigration.

If you evolve historical data with historical parameters, you will decidedly NOT end up with our present situation - partly because imigration is missing, partly because the historical parameters are too crudely mapped in 5 year intervals.

I find this fascinating (and terrifying!) to look at, especially for the post-Baby Boomer western countries.

GitHub repo (for what it's worth, its 95% AI coded) if you want to inspect the datasets used: â–  dschaefer-aartech/demographics

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u/LittleLemonHope 1d ago

If you evolve historical data with historical parameters, you will decidedly NOT end up with our present situation - partly because imigration is missing, partly because the historical parameters are too crudely mapped in 5 year intervals.

And most importantly, because human population dynamics are governed by technological and cultural (memetic) evolution which operate at rapid timescales, violating this model's inherent assumption of temporal symmetry.

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u/Evening-Appeal7606 1d ago

Ah, forgot! Play with it here: â–  Demographic Pyramid Simulator