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Functional programming through deep time: modeling the first complex ecosystems on earth

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Published:19 September 2011Publication History
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The ecology of Earth's first large organisms is an unsolved problem in palaeontology. This experience report discusses the determination of which ecosystems could have been feasible, by considering the biological feedbacks within them. Haskell was used to model the ecosystems for these first large organisms - the Ediacara biota. For verification of the results, the statistical language R was used. Neither Haskell nor R would have been sufficient for this work - Haskell's libraries for statistics are weak, while R lacks the structure for expressing algorithms in a maintainable manner. This work is the first to quantify all feedback loops in an ecosystem, and has generated considerable interest from both the ecological and palaeontological communities.

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References

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  1. Functional programming through deep time: modeling the first complex ecosystems on earth

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 46, Issue 9
      ICFP '11
      September 2011
      456 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2034574
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        ICFP '11: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
        September 2011
        470 pages
        ISBN:9781450308656
        DOI:10.1145/2034773

      Copyright © 2011 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 19 September 2011

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