FWIW, the majority of the first page of this user's comment history (6/10) are complaining about feminism in some fashion.
(I don't generally like looking at people's comment history, but one, you're absolutely spot-on that it would be easy to change the simulation - it's public domain and it's in JavaScript, this is Hacker News, if you don't know how to edit the JS console yourself there are tons of people who will gladly help if you ask, so the lack of curiosity is interesting. And two, I've seen some sort of shift in more vocal MRA-adjacent / alt-right-adjacent viewpoints on this site in recent weeks and I've been kind of curious where it's coming from.)
Anyway, in the hope of not dragging this too far off-topic: 'tnone, do you have a specific change you'd like to see implemented in the simulation? I'd be happy to implement the change and rehost it and see what happens. I think there are genuine criticisms to be made (for instance, https://github.com/ncase/polygons/issues/9 sounds worth some investigation, despite the phrasing of the comment thread). But given how easy it is to apply actual data to these questions, I think we should do that to avoid FUD.
In particular, how about changing the radius to be the surrounding 24 squares (two steps out, instead of one), or making it less likely that an individual polygon will move again shortly after it has moved?
Since I wrote that comment I feel the itch to do it myself :) He said topology, but I don't think he meant what I'm thinking of: a torus! A Mobius band! The projective plane! My curiosity is getting the better of me.
(I don't generally like looking at people's comment history, but one, you're absolutely spot-on that it would be easy to change the simulation - it's public domain and it's in JavaScript, this is Hacker News, if you don't know how to edit the JS console yourself there are tons of people who will gladly help if you ask, so the lack of curiosity is interesting. And two, I've seen some sort of shift in more vocal MRA-adjacent / alt-right-adjacent viewpoints on this site in recent weeks and I've been kind of curious where it's coming from.)
Anyway, in the hope of not dragging this too far off-topic: 'tnone, do you have a specific change you'd like to see implemented in the simulation? I'd be happy to implement the change and rehost it and see what happens. I think there are genuine criticisms to be made (for instance, https://github.com/ncase/polygons/issues/9 sounds worth some investigation, despite the phrasing of the comment thread). But given how easy it is to apply actual data to these questions, I think we should do that to avoid FUD.
In particular, how about changing the radius to be the surrounding 24 squares (two steps out, instead of one), or making it less likely that an individual polygon will move again shortly after it has moved?