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Limited Population Growth

Part 5: Fruit Flies: Increasing the Number of Steps

We consider now what happens when the same time interval is subdivided into more pieces. There will, of course, be more points on each of the curves, but that's not particularly important. We are interested in whether taking more and shorter time steps alters the growth curve in any significant way -- in particular, in whether we can "improve" the simulation by computing more often.

Your worksheet is set up to plot the "leftover" results from Part 4 (n = 20) along with each "new" set of simulated data. This will give you "reference" curves by which you can judge changes as you change n.

  1. Plot the population and growth curves with the time interval [0,100] divided into 40 steps. Record any differences you see as you change from 20 to 40 steps. In particular, what does the new model predict about population size on days 20 and 100?

  2. Repeat for 80 steps.

  3. Repeat for 160 steps.

  4. Repeat for 320 steps.
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Last modified: September 23, 1997