General > Off Topic
Thoughts about other a-life progs.
Numsgil:
Well first you have to figure out exactly what you're trying to model. DB is about behavioral evolution. Avida is about reproduction (specifically the mechanisms needed to reproduce).
Testlund:
One way could be to get a hold of the source code from one of those A-life programs and develop them further. ...or just try to make a similar program with more features.
Welwordion:
I doubt the approach most games take to simulate life,s o no improving of something I not believe in stuff.
Ok all things search for stability, you could say the have an intern fitness functiion that stems from the minimation of force and the darwinian concept, life in this concept can be understood as the cooperation of parts that influence the fitness function to their advantage by changing local conditions(which influence the stability of an pattern).
So I would try an concept where manifold structures can arise from basic concepts, may the geometrical or chemical or simple gicven trough an cellular automata. These structures would now need a basic set of rules to interact so a function can be determined(like proteins work by their geometrical structure).
After creating this basic biochemistry we could introduce an Ai that is able to perform basic actions to contol its "body", where this AI would "learn" to work with its body by a system of association( to associate a certain feedback with certain actions)
Numsgil:
Let me rant about emergence for a moment.
People see emergence as some sort of magic bullet that wonderfully gives you a balanced and working system with minimal thought or effort. It just does all the work for you, yippee!
It doesn't work like that.
What you're basically doing is making the emergent properties decide the basic interworkings of your system for you. That is, you're turning over creative control of all the processes to something that, by its very nature, you have limited control over.
The benefits of an emergent system are that literally thousands and perhaps millions of design decisions are made for you. The pitfall is that literally thousands and millions of design decisions are made for you.
That's a two edged sword. You give up total control in the hopes that something brilliant will come from it.
Most emergent systems aren't that brilliant. There's some single best solution and it's fairly boring.
So when someone says "my system will be entirely emergent" it tells me they've never created an emergent system, and their results are probably going to be rather limited.
You should first decide what you want to see happen in your system specifically and then decide how to get there, wether through thousands of high end rules are several dozen low order rules.
The one benefit of emergence is self-consistancy, so I tend to use it in areas that have several thousand decisions to be made and needs to be fairly consistant. DB's future metabolism feature would be a good example. But emergence works there because of the inherant self-similarity of that system. A + B turns into C, which has exactly similar properties to A and B, but just with different magnitudes.
Welwordion:
Well let me take a minute to rant over "designed" systems, the creator often thinks that coming up with a system to mimick a certain aspect of life and the adding dozen of features makes a good game, but in reality he just creates some kind of predetermined movie with some alternative telling order.(I want to learn soemthing new and not only see something I created in the code )
Emergent systems are far from beeing easy soltutions, rather it needs more mindwork and trial and error to find a good system instead of programming dozens of strange code that eats calculation power and such limits complexity.(If you ever tried to find cellular automata rule that give interesting results you know what I mean)
Also its exactly the biochemical aspects I want to create by relying on an open sytem like 3 or 4 dimensional geometry etc. I am more than aware that many systems will only give one predetermined optimum and that is exactly the reason I am not going with the first best idea but rather want to hold a detailed conversation about this.
Also I am aware of the limis of a purely physical/biochemistrical system which is why I introduce the Ai "soul" into the components object consists of.
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