Hi Chiroptera.
Nearly forgot about this.
Chiroptera writes:
Hmm. I see what you mean by feasibility. Ten generations would require more than a thousand people.
Er... it would? Perhaps I misunderstood your scenario so correct me if I'm wrong, but beginning with a single individual and given that every individual would "descend" to two new individuals, would it not simply be a matter of the population doubling each generation?
If so then it should proceed as follows:
Generation 1: 1
Generation 2: 2
Generation 3: 4
Generation 4: 8
Generation 5: 16
Generation 6: 32
Generation 7: 64
Generation 8: 128
Generation 9: 256
Generation 10: 512
The way I figure it, by the time we reach generation 8 the total number of posts in the thread would be 255. Going to generation 9 would push it up to 511, well over the limit. So it would appear that the most generations we could fit evenly into a single thread would be eight, requiring a total of 255 "individuals." But, again, I may have misunderstood your proposal.
Just to clarify, though, I wasn't actually referring to the feasibility of the large numbers required. As I said, rather than expecting 255 unique posters on the forum to participate, perhaps after several generations have gone by and the population numbers have become considerably large, the participants could start replying in multiple branches. I don't know how well this would work but if there were, by this time, a significant difference between the messages of corresponding "individuals" within each given generation then it may work well enough.
What I thought was not particularly feasible was performing such an experiment in written form. Reading a message and then relaying it in writing is one thing...
hearing a message and then relaying it
verbally is quite another. I think your idea about relaying the message by memory the following day is a good one, though. That could go part of the way to achieving the desired effect. The key to making the thread's development resemble descent with modification would be to assure that the "replication" process is imperfect.
Chiroptera writes:
I've never actually played telephone myself -- how many generations do you need to get a significant difference from the original message?
I've only played it once that I recall, and that was in about grade seven. I'm probably changing the details even more by relaying this now, but to the best of my recollection, it began with a message about some kind of competition that you could send away for, and ended up being about a place where you go to learn calligraphy.
This was after passing through everyone in our class which consisted of perhaps 25 - 30 students. To be honest, I was quite surprised that even that number of steps was enough to change the original message so significantly.
EDIT: My apologies, Chiroptera. I've just now re-read your message and I made an obvious error. I was only taking the tenth generation itself into account. In retrospect, I assume that when you said "ten generations" you meant the
total number of individuals (i.e. up to, and including, the tenth generation). That would indeed require more than a thousand people.
Sorry about that. I really shouldn't post when I'm half asleep.
This message has been edited by Tony650, 09-09-2005 12:52 AM