Bots and Simulations > Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims

Interesting sim

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Numsgil:
I plan to in the future, but at the moment it's not as clear cut as you might think.

EricL:
I've been musing on the subject of costs.  I think we should perhaps think about moving away from user-settable costs for each and every specific bot action, at least for physical actions.  Otherwise, we are quickly going to be buried in a pile of highly specific optional costs whose values can be set wildly inconsistant with one another.

Instead I think we should try to move towards having only a few costs or perhaps only one which are a level of abstraction removed from specific morphological actions such as movement.  For example, we could allow the user to set a ratio for nrg to Work (call it a nrg/calorie) and have the engine calculate how many calories it takes for a bot to perform a specific action, from turning itself to accelerating itself to changing a tie length and angle.  These internal calculations would be hard coded, part of the physics of DB and be a function of mass and fluid resistance and friction and moment arm, integrated over time where appropriate - code that is already somewhat in place.  The human user (or dynamic costs) would tweak the nrg/calorie expenditure ratio and the resultant cost application would be consistant across the range of physical bot actions.

Not a fully formed suggestion.  We would want to keep such thigns as shot and tie costs as separate I think, but you see where I'm going...

shvarz:
I agree.  I think this worked well for physics and it should work well for costs.  I would still leave the possibility to tweak all individual costs, but would hide it deep in options.  It would still allow custom sims and it would allow to easily check all default costs, but it would reduce the number of commonly used costs settings.  Group these costs by their effects and then give options like "no cost, small cost, medium cost and high cost" with "hints" appearing for each group.

Jez:
I had a bot that used a bug in previous version of DB to extend repro tie and send parent flying away from child, leading to baby propelled bots. It's a way cool technique for providing free propulsion. I can certainly see why it would be an advantage for your bots, not only sharing food out but sending the feeding bot flying off toward it's next veg without it having to waste energy on acceleration.

I'd love to know how long this behaviour persists in your sim.

Probably a good idea to have a cost for ties that is proportional to shot costs and rewards.

Eric, yep, like it, costs as a calculation of enviroment and nrg/calorie expenditure. I'm sure evosimmers would like to keep access to the individual cost adjustment but having an way to adjust sim costs in an easy and consistent manner would be great.

Testlund:
I have my doubts about this idea with not being able to set the costs I want. When I start a zerosim from scratch the bots can't have some costs at all because it whould whipe them out. Then as they evolve I can increase the costs and adapt them to what the bots can handle. this is very sensitive. Just setting the ageing cost to 0.001 instead of 0.0001 can whipe out the whole population.
At the same time I whould prefer if the costs were hardcoded and as close to how real world physics and metabolism works for cells and that I didn't need to put any cost values in at all, but that whould require fully working bots from the start.
At the moment I have managed to evolve my bots to a point where I can have all the costs I want. I've tried to balance out the costs to be as close to realism as I can understand and at the same time workable with the bots and day/night cycles set to 10000.
Jez suggestion whould be a good idea I think, to have both options.

I whould like to add why I'm so concerned about realism. It's because I see that DB can be a great model to try and learn how life works. For instance, maybe we can prove some day that life doesn't need a God to exist and that working cells can come alive and evolve all by themselves.

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