Adding "one more morph": A bright future for the BP industry

[nevohraalnavnoj]

I recently added a nice vanilla female to my collection, courtesy of Marc Bailey (pictures coming soon). Yes, I did have to pry it from his hands tooth and nail. This got me to thinking: What is the marginal gain of adding one more morph to the collection?

Throughout this discussion I won't consider "super forms", so a pastel and a super pastel are lumped together in my counting. Bumblebee and killerbee would also be the same, etc... If someone wants to tackle this one, be my guest!

I also won't count normals, once again for ease of discussion.

Say you have one gene (a), then you can at best produce animals with the gene (a).

Now say you have two genes (a,b), then you can produce animals with gene (a), gene (b), and genes (a) & (b).

Keep going...we could write it out like this:

(a) = {a}
(a,b) = {a, b, ab}
(a,b,c) = {a, b, c, ab, ac, bc, abc}
(a,b,c,d) = {a, b, c, d, ab, ac, ad, bc, bd, abc, abd, bcd, abcd}

etc....

The recursion is: morphs(n+1) = 2*morphs(n)+1

We can plug this into Excel to see how fast this grows:

genes / morphs
1.... 1
2.... 3
3.... 7
4.... 15
5.... 31
6.... 63
7.... 127
8.... 255
9.... 511
10... 1023
11... 2047
12... 4095
13... 8191
14... 16383
15... 32767


Adding the vanilla bumped me from 9 to 10 genes, and so increased from 511 combos to 1023. Once again none of this is accounting for super forms so these are all vast underestimates.

I think this is one cause of the addictiveness of ball pythons and an indicator of the future strength of the market. The marginal gain from adding one more gene to your collection is a dramatic increase in the number of combo morphs you can produce.

JonV