PlantStudio

Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design" (a 1986 book by Richard Dawkins). I can also credit a computer music course I took at Princeton circa 1984 from Paul Lansky with helping inspire the idea of generating interesting sounds and soundscapes. Although before that was playing around with sound on the Commodore PET including via a four voice sound card (an amazing thing back then in the late 1970s) and then on the VIC-20 and C64. Having an electronic organ in the house growing up was also another influence (including as keys would get stuck on) -- as was a tape recorder. Hard to remember how difficult any sort of electronic music and sound was to do in the late 1970s and early 1980s... Now it seems almost trivial given smartphones and laptops... I can also credit a graduate course a SUNY Stony Brook called "Understanding Math through Art and Music" which I audited. I made a final project on a Mac that randomly generated eight musical notes. It was not much of a project (and not even a full octave span) -- but it made me realize that there is art in how we choose to take randomness and convert it into something tangible or audible. One key early idea early on was also learning from a Commodore PET newsletter how to make a stream of pseudo-random numbers from a simple algorithm -- which I eventually used to generate terrain for a VIC-20 game called Intruder Scramble (inspired by the Scramble Arcade game). That video game helped pay for part of Princeton. And that idea of a repeatable stream of pseudo-random numbers to define a derived repeatable structure you can explore then made its way into PlantStudio and EvoJazz/MusicalPhrases. Minecraft uses a similar idea for producing repeatable terrain from a seed value.

de for the soil models references the EPIC equations and the related scientific literature. The simulator was written under earlier versions of windows (Win 3.1 and 95), and from around WinXP and later it seems the code that updates the registry causes an error. Not sure how to easily work around that. You can download the source here: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997... Or, I just put it up on GitHub right now for you: :-) https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997... Here is the file you would want to focus on first, and it does mention nitrogen fixation and nodules, but you'd have to make your own decision about how useful that was to you as a reference: https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997... Here are the lines to look first inside that file: https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997... Remember that a lot of EPIC is empirically derived functions and values from US soils in certain climates -- so it may not be totally applicable elsewhere, even if it is a place to start. And here is a 100 page programmer's manual: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/progmanlong.htm I put our PlantStudio and StoryHarp code up on GitHub (which share some common code with the garden simulator) and have been meaning to someday put the garden simulator code there. I spent a couple of months about a decade ago porting part of the code base to Java and also Python which involved writing a Delphi parser and translation tool, but the result is not a finished work. But the converted code for the garden simulator is not on GitHub (yet). You can see some of the converted plant drawing code here though: https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio I had wanted to help develop self-replicating space habitats and helping people grow their own food better seemed like a good first step towards that which both had short-term on-Earth benefits plus long-term benefits for space settlement. We did this all on our own money from consulting and also credit cards. When they were maxed out (~US$100K) we took unrelated programming jobs at IBM Research and elsewhere to pay it all back on-time with interest -- it took many years to get back to zero -- and we never got a chance to do that much more with the simulator... Our (at first shareware) PlantStudio software was a spinoff for breeding virtual plants which got substantial interest from 3D modellers -- but even there, we did not have time to keep improving it since we were both working full-time the at IBM. PlantStudio was mainly my wife's project in response to user feedback from the Garden Simulator that people liked playing with the plant design part of it. We eventually made that free and then open source. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm And then we had a kid: :-) http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/historyandfuture.html After that effort on our own, I'd get a bit annoyed I got when I'd watch NASA and other places give big grants to people who then made proprietary software with it. That motivated me to write essays like this back around 2001: http://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html "As a software developer and content creator, I find it continually frustrating to visit web sites of projects funded directly or indirectly by government agencies or foundations, only to discover I can't easily improve on those projects because of licensing restrictions both on redistribution and on making derived works of their content and software. ..." But I can give kudos at the USDA ARS BRC and the EPIC team for developing their code in-house and putting it in the public domain. The EPIC developers (but not administrators) were annoyed a bit themselves at our own plan originally to make proprietary software from their models, which was another factor in our making that garden simulator effort FOSS. Our hope had been to keep improving those models and getting more people involved in that process online with a 2.0 version of the software as a shared modelling environment. But our few small efforts to find funding to continue in that direction were not productive. I guess we were just better software developers than sales people. :-) Plus we have learned a lot since then about a more incremental development style. http://gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm Anyway, I can hope that using that Garden Simulator software as an initial reference point can help a next generation of soil scientists and free software developers create even better software for research, education, and applications from bringing soil anywhere back to life. :-)