Hiya!

[Kerian Valentine]

Hi! Kerian Valentine here. I stumbled across A-Life about four years ago, but I lost most of my programs when my laptop up and died (foul thing). Running along Wikipedia in a fit of boredom, I discovered DarwinBots.

My old hobby flared up again, and I quickly downloaded the program, started messing with it, et cetera. (I've had sims running for over fourty hours to date!)

Well, about a day ago, I had the crazy idea to load one of my already-running sims in a new window, with a maximized mutation rate.

Autosaving every fifteen minutes as "Mutie_Peak," the program continued on to the next morning as I enjoyed a good, long sleep.

When I come downstairs, I find that all but one of them is dead. I quickly save its DNA and run through the sequence, checking for what was missing.

Sure enough, it was the reproduction genes.

Figuring I could add them later, I went onto the WikiManual and found the Viruses.

"Hey," I said, "This code that says it changes them into sorta zombies sounds pretty spiffy!" (Internal dialogue more complicated than that =P)

I hurriedly tapped it in, along with a reproduction code...

...fired up the simulation....

...five Mutie_Peaks, five Algae_Minimalis, five C_Ancestralis (I like seeing what they evolve into when they survive, and for some reason, they tend to).

Hit play.

About fifty seconds later, the 'Born' rate has gone up to...

2400.

I'm staring at my screen, watching five massive colonies - they could be cancers or something! - of bots, all tied together because I didn't put in the "Cut Birthtie" set.

And I'm thinking, "what in the heck did I do wrong?"


I'm hoping there's a way to at least cap the population, because it quickly reduces the program to the point where it can't even run, in Flicker and Fast mode without graphics.

If not, well, is there a way to at least fix this virus issue?


Edit: Full file is now attached - run it in a simulation with only one bot and five veggies, and see what happens.

Edit #Whatever:

Would it be possible to create a bot - one that would probably require untold amounts of energy - to continually reproduce, solidify the ties, force a reproduction from its child, and then inject the child with the virus listed on the WikiManual (this virus turns infected bots into zombielike conspecs)? Essentially, I'm thinking it would create a single colony with a massive set of 'dead' or catatonic ties.

[Testlund]

Well, there is one way to limit the population quite effectly, especially if you run it under the latest 2.42 version. If you check the DNA of the bots you wish to chose, you can see at what amount of energy they are programmed to multiply. Start a sim with the maximum of bots you want to allow in the sim and let them start with an energy level just below where they can multiply. Then check what the total energy says at the bottom of the screen. Check that box where you can chose the sun to go down when total energy reaches that point and type in that value and start a new sim. This will limit the bots to that amount. This is how I do it to figure out what maximum and minimum energy values to allow in the sim. To find out at what level you want the sun to rise to prevent extinction, you start with minimum amount of bots with minimum energy and check the total energy value. I hope my explanation made sense here, with my somewhat limited english vocabulary.  

[Numsgil]

Darwinbots is finicky.  It's open ended enough that it's actually rather easy to set up a simulation that self destructs.  It makes it all the more exciting when you create a stable system.
 
 Bots that constantly reproduce are going to slow your simulation down.  Your best bet is to make such bots evolutionary dead ends by playing around with the costs.  Costs that effect bots everytime they multiply or every cycle are good ideas.  It'll kill off any bots that reproduce faster than it consumes.