This applet originated from research work, performed in Manchester and Oxford universities by Audrius Meskauskas, in cooperation with David Moore, Mark Fricker and McNulty. Audrius Meskauskas has been the only programming researcher, and at the time or running the project he had neither direct payment for work nor any agreements with both universities on the code ownership, so assumes that he own the code and has right to share it under GPL. The applet (GUI, in general) mode was only used in presentations: scientific results were obtained using command-line runs on supercomputers (we have used Java for distributed computing, did we) that produces series of images. The code is capable to drop the current "mycelia" and its image in periodic intervals of the virtual time. So this is the project and contribution of the head of this page, the Emacs of Ultrastudio.org .
We are actually proud that while we published the results in a normal good mycological journal, the were found by the independent researcher and republished in Nature, the queen of the scientific press.
This work is covered in the following scientific publications:
Ultrastudio.org version has been brushed a little bit after 2003 year development, optimizing the GUI for less experienced user. It has now several quick presets, then still very friendly "master mode", while it is possible to go to parameter sets and customize number of parameters as it was done in the research work.
The time, required for the applet to produce each subsequent generation, increases with the growth of the "cyberfungi", as more and more complex colony must be now analysed for various fields and gradients. This limits the size of colonies that can be easily grown on a desktop PC (much bigger colonies can be obtained during long unsupervised runs).
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