• intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    They are after humans in the food web.

    The food web is directed but not acyclic, meaning that arrows can point in a loop.

    An example of a directed, acyclic “web” (technically a graph), would he books being published that quote other, previously published books.

    Another is (ideally) the library dependencies of a codebase. If you end up with a loop in your dependency graph your package manager will probably fail.

    An example of a non-directed graph is the covid contact data that our phones were collecting if we opted in during the pandemic. If I was close to you, you were close to me. It basically means if we drew you and I as dots on paper, it would be a line connecting us not an arrow.

    The food web is directed (there is the eater and the eaten) but not acyclic. I can eat a bear, and the bear can eat me, which would be represented not as one line, but as two arrows pointing to and fro.