I am so frustrated with Confettis I wish I was seeing Red!

[Tad Carlucci]

Well, that's why I keep adding comments about Chaos. But that's jumping too far down the road.

Let's just take your basic question: Can we adjust the probability of a Confetti appearing so that we avoid certain death or explosive growh (seen as certain death in pricing)?

Technically, the answer is: yes, but only if we don't want a playable game and, intead, want a simple production machine.

So, the answer, for us, is: NO!

If the production per parent is some random factor less than 1 we get the Confetti's we have now. The population will eventually die. We can adjust how quickly it will die, but death is certain.

If the production per parent is some factor more than 1, we get the non-Confetti's we have now. The population will eventually grow to consume all of Second Life (or, in this case, all of AWS, since we only need an online database of living cats and boxes, and eventually delete all non-breeding and menagerie cats to make room for more). We can adjust only how quickly that will happen.

To get the production to be exactly 1 we have two choices.

We can simply eliminate all randomness and give it to you. Choose a rule. The easiest is "the first offspring will be Confetti, then no others." But that's not a game. It's boring. And we have that game, already, every season with the Special Offspring. Another easy fix simply says "Confetti is just a breedable fur trait, like Red Tabby or any other." But that eliminates the "Confetti Game" entirely.

Or we can try to add feedback where we're keeping it close to 1. As it moves up and down, we adjust the lambda to counter the offset.

And THERE is where Chaos enters the picture.

We really can't tell if the adjustment we're about to make will help or hurt. And if it hurts, the countering change might help too much, not enough, or hurt more. There is no way to know. Maybe our feedback will settle down. Maybe it will cycle. Maybe we'll crash. Maybe we'll explode. Maybe the result will be so chaotic we have no idea what to do next. All we can see is large changes will generally have large effect. While Chaos Theory tells us that small changes might have little effect, but can have surprisingly large effect. We just won't know until we commit to doing so. And, then, when we find out, it's too late: either we don't have any Confetti to work with, or we have so many we have kill a HUGE bunch off just to have a managable set to work with. Neither is very acceptable.