Tragedy of the Commons

The destruction of natural shared resources is a travesty that can be mathematically understood. Our hack is a 3D application that represents the relationship, modeling it after Konza Prarie.

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Inspiration

  • Driving here and passing by Konza Prarie made me remember the short poetic essay "Think Like A Mountain" by Aldo Leopold and the power that humans carry, especially with the recent environmental cost of Big Tech with AI integration into other projects. ## What it does
  • Represents R and K selected species mathematically
  • Allows for the simulation of natural birth/death of rabbits
  • Allows for tracking of individual rabbits
  • Gives the user the ability to pause the simulation with (space)
  • Allows the user to introduce predators by clicking P
  • Live Prey/Population count demonstrates the relationships between overuse of resources
  • Population growth/decline is written by year to a CSV file
  • AI integration through MCP to prompt about data and correlations
  • Matplotlib to view the info given by the CSV file ## How we built it
  • Ground up implementation using ursina, a high level 3D engine in python
  • Developed the world and separate update loop to keep track of all entities
  • Simulated rabbit/bobcat intellegence and life/death
  • Multiple tests to demonstrate veracity of the tragedy of the commons

Challenges we ran into

  • Finding an accurate timeframe and representation of reality within the simulation
  • Python is not built for 3D, lots of optimization required to make it run at a speed greater than 30 FPS
  • Simulating hunting especially in represents to time and simulating the hunger of the bobcat.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Accurately demonstrates the Tragedy of the Commons and the interactions that happen between different animals.
  • Making a functioning application ground up from a new Python framework
  • Full AI integration through MCP allowing for more interactivity between us and the content that can bridge the learning gap ## What we learned
  • Don't try to build anything on OpenGL if it's not super native
  • Writing chase functions are a lot harder than you think
  • Even MacBooks can crash running Python :( ## What's next for Tragedy of the Commons
  • I'd love to polish some code and functions and take some of the code and rebuild it using a faster engine (maybe 2D) to allow for more ease of use

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