More strange behavior

It happened again. If you don't know, I'm working on a simulation of a water bug (it looks more like a round pea than a bug) that lives in water but needs to surface to breathe oxygen.

I have mentioned weird behavior before that I won't go into here. I realize it must be explained by the interaction of a number of different behaviors, which, because of the growing complexity, makes it hard to predict exactly how the program will behave.

In order to "breathe", the water pea simply has to surface periodically. The code simply says that when it's time to breathe, then surface. This sounds simple enough, but today during testing, one of the water peas simply drowned. It never even made an attempt to swim to the surface.

That may not sound so unusual, but it has happened exactly once. It should never happen. It never has happened before or since, and I can't reproduce it. So, there's that. I guess it shouldn't be so surprising; as I've said, this isn't due to a bug in the code, but in the complex interactions of the different behaviors acting together simultaneously.

There is something exciting about seeing one-off behavior like this that neither I, nor anyone else, may ever see again.

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