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Eyes

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Zinc Avenger:
How about making which eye has focus changeable?

Strip the special status from eye5, and make eye5 the default "focus" eye, the way it currently is, and designate a memory location to hold an identifier to say which of the eyes has focus. So stick a 2 in it, and eye2 has focus. Stick a 9 in it and eye9 has focus. I don't really see why this should have much in the way of prohibitive costs, unless you want to give bots the option of focussing multiple eyes simultaneously.

This also has the benefit of not breaking existing bots

Testlund:
The way I see it is the bots are single cellular life forms, and as such it is unrealistic for them to have any vision at all, but within DB it might be difficult to chose another way for them to sense their environment. That's why I have suggested that their vision radius should be decreased so they allmost need to touch another bot to see it. I'm thinking that real bacteria for instance has to be very close to sense something. I think real bacteria swim around searching for food and doesn't discover it until they bump into it.

EricL:
There exist photo-sensitive bacteria which have multiple photo-receptors which can sense differences in directional brightness.  Many single celled species use such senses for navigation, so your claim of eyes on single cells being unrealistic is not well supportted.

But that is somewhat beside the point.  I see no strong reasn why DB must parallel biology at all and it is not a naive question to ask why the simulated environment has any relationship to the physical world at all.  We could have chosen a more CoreWars / Avida approach where bot phenotytpes are software artifacts competing in a nonintuitive virtual environment more condusive to pure software entities and wholly divorced from the physcial world and it's physics.  Why didn't we?

The answer of course is that humans are the ones viewing the evolved behaviour and choosing a virtual environment with an intuitive and consistant set of physics means it is easier for us to recognize evolved behaviour.  But this does not mean we must place artifical or biological limits on bot senses as an attempt to imitate biology.

I'm all for encouraging multibot evolution and as such there is a long list of things I would not want to see single bots capable of but we must be realistic w.r.t. available computing power.  If we required many bots to cooperate in order to acheive meaningful vision, it would take a long time to evolve and as I have said many times, I'm primarily interested in evolving behaviour, not senses, so I favor enhancing single bot vision, not degrading it.

Changing subjects somewhat, the suggestion of bots being able to change the focus eye and the suggestions of allowing for bots to change eye direction and field of view are not mutually exclusive.  Likely I will implement all of them over time.

Numsgil:
If we were to modify the way the day/night cycles work, so that the amount of ambient light in the sim is near zero at dawn/dusk, and practically zero at night, we could have vision radius decrease to reflect this.

In the middle of the night you would have to get up really close to other bots to see them at all, because there isn't enough light.

This isn't an expensive operation in code at all.  You'd just decrease the vision radius.  We could also tie in the pond mode gradient, so bots in the deeper parts of the sim have the same effect, regardless of what time it is.

Testlund, that would let you run the sims you want, where eyes just really don't work.

The vision radius would need to relate to the cos or sin of the current day/night cycle.  I think it would be pretty easy to code.

EricL:

--- Quote from: Numsgil ---If we were to modify the way the day/night cycles work...
--- End quote ---

A most execellent idea sir and I agree, fairly easy to code.  On my list.

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