I got back just in time to see the last heterocyst of generation XVI do it's stuff. I've started playing with them again, and there still seems to be some evolution left in them, though the nice straight line of progress is now bent. Unsurprising really, given that it measures the time it takes to reach 50 cells from 5, and there is definite a limit to how little time that is possible. But they are still progressing and showing some weird mutations, that I'll have to check out some time. I stumbled upon the explanation guide looking for a picture of a heterocyst with a9. I don't know why it was there before Wikipedia, and I was a little surprised to see my work there.
19th May 2005
Annoyingly, I forgot to leave my heterocyst program running while I was out. It would be nice if I could make it a screensaver, like SETI and the Oxford drugs one. I was reading about it in Science just yesterday. Distributed computers are better than supercomputers and free.
31st May 2005
I found a blinking heterocyst. I think lots of the heterocyst that evolved go through oscillations, which might simply be because time is not continuous in the simulation, but in this one it's oxygen levels were oscillating right on the border between values coloured red, and those coloured black, so it looked like it was flashing.
3rd June 2005
I'm currently on generation 6 of a third run of heterocyst evolution. I've made also a made a visual basic program that saves me so much time in data manipulation. I wish I'd done it earlier.