PhD Mentor-Tree Belief Drift Simulator 3D

Mentor Tree

Tree depth (generations) 5

Branching factor (students / advisor) 3

Per-generation drift rate 35%

Lineage count (leaves)

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Total candidates

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Root belief

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Leaf-gen variance

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Belief variance by generation (0→leaf)

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How it works

The 2D companion shows this tree's outcome as a flat per-generation belief distribution. Here the tree itself is drawn in 3D: the root advisor sits at the top, and every generation of students is placed on a wider, lower ring — a "conical" layout where each node's angular slice is inherited and subdivided among its own children, so the tree fans out and downward exactly like a real academic pedigree chart.

child belief:   b' = clamp(b + X·δ, 0, 1)
drift trigger:  X  ~ Bernoulli(driftRate)     (independent, per hop)
deviation:      δ  ~ Uniform(−Δ, +Δ),  Δ = 0.12
layout:         y = −g·spacing,  angle = parent.angle ± slice/2 per sibling

Color = belief — every candidate sphere is colored on the same blue→orange axis as its belief value, so a branch's color visibly wanders away from the root's color as drift accumulates down the generations.
Why a cone, not a flat disk — radius grows with generation depth so siblings at deep generations don't overlap; this is purely a layout choice; the belief math is identical to the 2D companion.
Same node cap (~4,000) as the 2D version, for frame-rate safety with instanced rendering.

Belief: empiricist → theorist Root advisor

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PhD Mentor-Tree Belief Drift Simulator (3D)