the ripening rate of bananas

while perusing a number of papers on Cellular Automata and Evolutionary Programming for analog circuits, I began pondering bananas. I happened to be eating one at the time.

This made me ponder why this banana was relatively green, even though I bought the bunch a few days earlier, this led me onto this theory:

If we take the assumptions:

1) Fruit in general ripens faster if there is other riper fruit around
2) Bananas of the same bunch tend to be at the same state of "ripeness"

we can conclude I'm a bit of a dick. Not just this but also that:

The ripening rate of a singular isolated bunch of bananas is approx. exponential. This theory is based on this imaginary case study:

If we imagine a bunch of bananas as some sort of Swarm. We can then give each banana some sort of individual localised behavior. i.e:

if nearest neighbour ripeness is > than own ripeness then increase own ripeness by a randomly weighted amount relative to the difference.

From this the emergent property of the swarm system should be that when all bananas have low ripe-ness the rate should be low, then possibly a momentum of "ripenessing" should build up, hence an exponential rate of ripening.

Either that or I just proved they ripen using a linear equation. Whatever, we can safely say it still stands that I'm a dick.

5 comments:

Stuey D 1:07 pm  

Word brother,

Chin Up, you should see the Connectionism notes I just printed out.

You're damn lucky you don't do it!

Tommeh 1:18 pm  

lol I'm only a dick as a cunning cover up method, as I'm sure that's what my homey Ad would call me after reading that post :P

Anonymous 9:37 pm  

*cough*
your a dick

Anonymous 2:33 pm  

That makes sense, except u forgot that the ripening response function is also based on a reverse square function of the distance between the 2 bananas.

basically, far away bananas don't do much.

Tommeh 10:37 pm  

esrever ni tnew ecno I

General Ramblings and Observations by Tom of Earth: a cryptic emotionally-driven look into the life of times of the infamous sock wearer, gadget-whore, unintentional blasphemer, hypocrite, servant of Xenu, Pastafarian, absurdist and thantophobic...without me, its just aweso

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