Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the rank set the Rorschach Lab publishes with every organism it shows. Nothing in it is authored: each rank is read out of a column of the organism’s own row or walked over the population at the moment the response is built. One of the ranks, the phylum, is also the breeding pool a visitor can switch between.

The ranks

Generation is a count rather than a rank, but it travels in the same record and is displayed as a sixth line under the five.

The walk to the founder

A phylum is the founding ancestor of a lineage plus everything descended from it. The walk starts at the organism and repeats one step: take the first id in the row’s parents list and move to that row. It stops on the first of four conditions.

• The row records no parents.
• The row’s operator is fresh.
• The named parent row is not in the table.
• The walk reaches an id it has already visited.

Where it stops is the founder, and the founder’s title names the phylum. Only the first parent is ever followed, so a child of two parents takes the phylum of the first of them and no organism belongs to two phyla. A cross between phyla therefore moves its child into the first parent’s lineage rather than merging the two.

The result is cached per id, and every id passed on the way up is cached with the same founder. The breeder reads the same function, so the lineage a pair of parents is drawn from and the lineage a gallery card is filed under are one computation.

Class, genus and species

The operator stored as class is the operator that ran, not the one chosen. A structural operator often has nothing to work on, and a splice or graft that finds no shared loci falls through to jitter, which is then what the row records. A mutate that takes the radical branch is recorded as radical. A visitor cross records the first of splice, graft and jitter that applies.

Genus is a walk of the same shape over the prompt table: from the organism’s prompt gene up through parent_id until a gene has no parent, with the root’s id giving the name gene <id>. A child bred by a free structural operator is not assigned a gene of its own and carries its first parent’s, so it also carries its first parent’s genus.

Species is the title, one optional TITLE: line of at most four words returned by the model with the code, truncated at 60 characters. Only the model operators produce one. A child of a free structural operator, and a child of a visitor cross, inherits its first parent’s title verbatim, so a species name is shared across a family rather than unique to an organism.

Pools and the ecosystem

The pool list is computed from the visible population: every organism on the track that is alive, has rendered, and carries no error.

A phylum appears as a pool only with at least two visible members, because a pool exists to be paired and crossed within; below two it folds back into the ecosystem until the lineage grows again. Phyla are listed after the ecosystem, largest first. Nothing about this is stored or configured: the list is a reading of ancestry, so it follows deaths and births by itself.

A pool narrows three requests to one phylum: the pair dealt for judging, the gallery slice, and a visitor cross, which is refused outright when its two named organisms are not both in the named pool. The ecosystem is the absence of that filter rather than a pool id sent to the lab.

The visitor’s choice is held in the browser under the key rorschach_pool and is shared by the vote page and the gallery. A visit with no stored choice opens on the ecosystem. A stored choice that no longer appears in the list, which happens when a phylum dies out or drops below two visible members, falls back to the ecosystem rather than being reassigned.

The ranks on the public surface

The gallery is the only endpoint that carries taxonomy. Each item ships the five ranks and the generation alongside its code and its prompt gene; the pair endpoint ships an id and code and nothing else.

The gallery groups its cards under phylum headings in the order the phyla first appear in the slice. A card’s caption is its species, then its generation and class on one line. Opening a card lists all six values in rank order.