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terrain evolution simulated again!

Kokubunji, 2026.02.13

In the early '90s, I was completing the fourth year of the Geography undergraduate program at Brock. I wrote some software that generated a two-dimensional terrain and then showed how erosion shaped that landscape through rainfall. I used well-established figures for the 'average local slope' of world terrain, the amount of soil that's typically eroded in an environment that gets a moderate amount of rain, and then how much soil would be deposited where the water came to rest. It would make rivers, lakes, and alluvial fans. Fun stuff!

My career in software would last less than a year as I burned through not one but two local employers in my home town that both failed. But I kept the code, and today I had "Claude" the AI help me build a wrapper for the old thing. It's now online here.

This time, it's in 3-D, and you can rotate and zoom and so on. The AI found quite a few bugs, apparently the whole thing worked only because my various mistakes balanced each other out.