It seems to me that the topic here may really about how we (can I say 'we' as a newbie?) go about architecting for complex 'multi-cellular' organisms which exhibit specialized regions I.e. skin cells, poision generating cells, cells dedicated to getting rid of waste, cells dedicated to motivation, etc.
As a newbie, the current state of DB seems to me to be in tranisition. On the one hand, bots can be thought of cells, that is, as the atomic unit of DNA execution, the unit of specialization. As I understand it, things like ties are the beginings of multi-bot, multi-cell organisims I.e. the beginnings of mechnanisms for different cells/bots to communicate, specialize and cooperate and evenutally act collectivly as a single entity.
On the other hand, bots are currently complete organisms in themselves in that a single bot can perform a whole slew of different things from movement to vision to eating to posion, etc. Namely, it is not only possible but difficult to prevent all genes in the DNA of a bot being active all the time.
If we want to enable phenotype complexity where a skin can be penetrated, where venom producing cells have to be kept isolated from other cells, where eating the wrong parts of a organism could posion you unless you have evolved the right posion neutralizing cells, where some cells specialize in vision and others in locomotion, we need to decide what a cell is, I.e. what the unit of specialization is and what an organism is.
Personally (and this is admittedly a newbie view point) I think I would like to see the current notion of bot become the cell and thus would prefer to see investment in additional bot to bot communication and connection mechanisms over adding additional internal complexity to single bots I.e. within the single unit of DNA execution. I would suggest keeping bots amorphous entities with no internal structure and instead create organizational and physical structure and complexity at the bot-bot level.
I imagine organism embryogenesis where organisms grow, adding new cells/bots to themselves with mechanisms to control specialization, activating or surpressing certain genes for example when a cell/bot is created. The engine could encourage this by simulating real-world physics such as making it more costly for a cell to do multiple things, say to both generate posion and have eyes.
Its a long term goal but over time I think a muture organism consists of hundreds or more connected, communicating cells, created through embryogenesis (I think I am using that term correctly) each sharing the same DNA, each with their own parallel thread of execution that gets executed for each cycle in parallel, yet each executing only the genes within the genome that have been activated for them, each doing a specialized job which adds up to complex organism level behanvior.
Thus, I would suggest creating organism complexity at the connected multi-bot/multi-cell level is preferred to adding internal compartimental complexity to individual bots.
-E
