Phylograph · Roadmap project 1 · after the Storyboarding notebook, 2007–08

Lineland

A one-dimensional world wrapped into a circle, run forward in time. Each generation is laid down as a ring, the present outermost, the beginning at the center. Connect every child to its parent and the whole history becomes one branching figure: SUM Cₙ = tree of life.

They are not smaller. They are farther.

Click any life to trace its line back to the beginning. Click a second to find where the two lines meet.

generation0

alive now0

lives so far0

on a line to the present0

founder lines surviving0

Run

Generations per second 12

View Extruded ⇄ nested nested

Density gradient 3.0

0 spaces every generation evenly. Higher values give the recent past room and press the deep past toward the center.

Show the fur Color by inherited trait

World Rule of the world Wolfram rule

Sites around the circle 96 Founders 12 Birth chance 0.30 Death chance 0.10

Birth and death chances apply at once. Sites and founders take effect with “New world.”

What you are looking at

Each ring is one state of a circular Lineland. Its creatures persist in place, give birth into the empty site beside them, and die. A creature that simply lives on draws a radial line: the chain of continual existence. A birth draws a short diagonal: a branching.

The two views are one object

Unrolled, the history is a cylinder, a circle times an interval (S¹ × I), with every generation the same size. Nested, the same generations become rings converging on the beginning. Every time “state” is shrunk as it moves back. Drag the first slider slowly to watch one turn into the other.

Why the ancestor keeps moving

Follow every living creature back and the lines converge, so everyone alive shares one ancestor some generations back. Lineages that end are the fur. If we were to include all individuals that existed but were not ancestors, the tree would get progressively fuzzier.

Heredity versus automaton

Switch to a Wolfram rule and lines no longer come from one parent: each cell can draw on up to three. The figure becomes a braid instead of a tree. Perfect nesting, where no branches coincide, needs heredity with a single parent.