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Author Topic: Can animals be homosexual?  (Read 620 times)

martinuzz

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Can animals be homosexual?
« on: January 14, 2023, 05:02:13 pm »

The breeding pair of dogs that I brought on embark (they were puppies on embark, trained wardogs now) have not produced a single litter in 4 years time.

Do the sexuality tags apply for animals as well?
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http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73719.msg1830479#msg1830479

Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Can animals be homosexual?
« Reply #1 on: January 14, 2023, 05:29:31 pm »

Yes.
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Thorfinn

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Re: Can animals be homosexual?
« Reply #2 on: January 14, 2023, 06:04:08 pm »

According to @Putnam (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=180934.msg8443482#msg8443482) it's 5% chance. Banking everything on a single pair of important (to my forts, anyway) creatures is a bad idea -- in this case, it's about 10% chance you won't get a pair. You dramatically improve your odds by bringing 2 pair. The chance of both males being gay would be 0.25%, the chance of both females gay also 0.25%, so the chance of not getting some combination that is a breeding pair is about 0.5% (1-0.9975*0.9975).

Assuming the 5% is right, I'm thinking the random number generator must be hosed, though, because bringing 2 pairs of each bird is definitely failing way more often than would be expected.

[EDIT]
Just out of curiosity, I fired up the only two forts I still have beginning of game saves, and then opened them in Therapist and cheated in orientation. Had I gone with just a single pair of each of the 8 species (6 birds, plus cats and dogs), I would have had 1 non-pair in each save. Because I embarked with 2 pairs each, only one of the saves had a species without a breed pair, where all 4 were non-reproducing. That's a little high. If I did the math right, I should have had a 50% chance of having it happen at least once in 140 embarks.
[/EDIT]
« Last Edit: January 14, 2023, 06:31:17 pm by Thorfinn »
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Can animals be homosexual?
« Reply #3 on: January 14, 2023, 06:27:08 pm »

The orientation token is applicable to every creature that can be defined. So yes, and modifiable (but only a few of the values of the tokens arguement seem to be viable, as animals cannot marry).
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brewer bob

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Re: Can animals be homosexual?
« Reply #4 on: January 14, 2023, 06:42:46 pm »

Assuming the 5% is right

At least according to Toady it should be:
Quote from: Toady
(75:20:5, 5:20:75.  I knew they should have added up to 100 -- those are the ones from the code, just the fotf text was typo'd.)

And the Wiki has a page on orientation:
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Orientation

Thorfinn

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Re: Can animals be homosexual?
« Reply #5 on: January 14, 2023, 08:55:44 pm »

I believe those are the numbers. I'm just wondering if whatever it is that is generating the random numbers is doing something wrong. With those numbers, there should be a roughly 10% chance of a pair not reproducing. So if you do just single breeding pairs, you should expect roughly 1 in 10 to not produce offspring, which means bringing 7 species has roughly even odds of having at least one non-reproducing pair. Frequent enough I don't even bother trying that, so no data.

But 2 pairs, yes, that's every embark. I would expect a 50% chance of ending up with a non-breeding species roughly 1 out of 140. At 8 species per embark, roughly every 18th embark. Another way to look at it is that each embark has a shade below 4% chance of having at least one non-breeding species.

I might be just incredibly unlucky. Or at those ranges, it wouldn't take much of an error to add up. Say for example that the number being generated was rendered as an integer between 1 and 100. In that case, a 5% chance would be any number 5 or under. But if it were generating a number between 0 and 100, then checking for 5 and below means its really just a shade less than a 6% chance. That is simply not enough difference to notice unless you are talking about very rare events. In this case, a 5% chance would mean no kittens 6.25e-6, a 6% would mean no kittens 12.96e-6, less than half as often.

[EDIT]
I'm not complaining. Whatever the number is makes no difference. The game generates values as it does, and you get the outcomes you get. It doesn't really matter what those values are so long as it is still a playable game. And if you define that as almost guaranteed to get puppies, bring more than 1 pair.
[/EDIT]
« Last Edit: January 14, 2023, 09:04:12 pm by Thorfinn »
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Mohreb el Yasim

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Re: Can animals be homosexual?
« Reply #6 on: January 16, 2023, 02:42:52 am »

Assuming the 5% is right

At least according to Toady it should be:
Quote from: Toady
(75:20:5, 5:20:75.  I knew they should have added up to 100 -- those are the ones from the code, just the fotf text was typo'd.)

And the Wiki has a page on orientation:
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Orientation
Strange, when I made tests with it values not adding to 100 seemed right too (more like a ratio then a %, which per say is a ratio, but one that ads up to 100, I've seen other ratios to work correctly )
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