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Compartmentalization of the Bots

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Numsgil:
Right, so let's brainstorm what we could do that would make them necessary :)

The first thing that comes to mind is that it would explain the way in which shell, slime, and poison work.

The second thing is that it allows for phagocytosis or endosymbiosis as a natural consequence instead of a specifically programmed event.

Those are really the only two things I have at the moment.

In my mind, the bots are analogous to real cells, but have some "magic" properties.  In this case, their insides are rather gooey, so a membrane puncture wouldn't be like a balloon popping, but would be more like a cut in a higher organism.  It would be self-healing but would result in a certain amount of volume and mass loss (probably more dramatic than higher organisms.)

Elite:
Reason for partitioning bots:

Some enzymes may turn out to be poisonous to some bots (ie. breaking down their food into something that they can't digest and can't get rid of, or an enzyme that stops a bot shooting): if they can affect you, then how do you stop them doing so.

Or maybe you want to have a metabolic process going on seperate from another metabolic process (ie. photosynthesis and resparation in plants) - the two processes could be done in different partitions to stop them interfering with each other.

Putting stored fat in a tough membrane maight stop enemies eating your remains so quickly - they have to digest the sac first.

Sacs could be one of many cell structures. We could probably think up a bunch of them:
 - Cell wall
 - Nucleus, metabolic structure
 - Poison/venom sac
 - Senses? (such as the .eye commands)
 - Flagella?  (have to make before you can use movement commands?)
   etc.

Numsgil:
I've thought about it a little more and I'd like to modify what I said originally.

I think the boundaries between any two sacs should be an entity in and of itself.   Similar but slightly different.  In my original post I said that the cell wall is a sac, but I think it should have slightly different properties.

these "walls" seperating sacs should be able to have transporters (which carry substances that aren't permeable across the bundary), which obviously don't make much sense inside a sac.

Likewise shell and slime wouldn't make much sense inside a sac (except maybe as storage) but make alot of sense on a sac boundary.

How this would translate into program rules I'm not so sure.

So to ammend my original statement, the only two "gimmes" for sacs are the "outside" and "inside", with the cell wall being the wall between the two.

shvarz:
Let's define the topic a little better.  We may talk about sacs as "logical compartments" in the cell or we can talk about introducing "physical sacs" and their properties into DB universe.

The sacs as logical compartments are already there.  For example, memory locations are "sacs" - they are separate from each other and store certain things.  The Dna is in a compartment of its own - nothing can touch it at the moment.  In the proposed metabolism system we'll have tons of logical compartments.  The thing about these compartments is that they can be introduced at will, without any general rules.  So there is no need for a concept of a "sac" as there was no need until now.

The sacs as physical consequences of the membrane properties is a whole different matter.  Here we should create a more or less general system to describe the properties of bot's borders and/or of bot's internal environments.  These sacs would be physically present (visible?) in DBs.  I'm not a programmer, but to me it seems out of our reach.  After all, current "borders" of bots are simple circles and don't have any physical properties (well, there's been some steps forward in newer versions to introduce those).  But what we would be facing are fluid membranes, able to shift around, give bots different shapes (for real), invaginate, fuse and so on...  I doubt Nums would be able to code such crazy thing into DB and even if he can, I'm sure it will slow down the program to a crawl...

Numsgil:
It's theoretically feasible for a more amorphous blobby membrane instead of a perfect circle, but it's out of reach of the current physics engine.  Several things would need to be introduced before we could seriously consider it.

As to simulation slowdown...  It would be present, but I don't think it would be terrible.  Again, a large number of things have to happen first so it's sort of out of reach at the moment.

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