Team:Aberdeen Scotland/parameters/invest 3

Monte Carlo Simulations

To test how these values work in our model we utilised what is known as a "Monte Carlo Simulation". This works by running the entire simulation thousands of times, but each times the simulation runs the parameters are randomised. This allows us to easily take three parameters, for example K_LacI, K_TetR and K_cI and plot each of them on an axis of a three dimensional plot. Every time we run a simulation we randomly chose these three variables between the lower expected limit and the upper expected limit and plot a point in our 3D graph correlating to the randomly chosen values. This point is then colored to show how the simulation worked. The final style we used was to plot a black point if the simulation lysed before the input was added (by accidently triggering itself) or if the simulation did not lyse in a given period (usually 9 hours). all simulations which did lyse in the desired time frame were plotted in color, and the color is matched to the the amount of X that was produced, as a percentage of the maximum possible X.