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Darwinbots enzyme system

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Carlo:
Shvarz,

in fact it may be a whole new project. I've been thinking for a long time to an alife sim working along these lines - but never had the time to start coding. But some of the ideas could maybe work in DB too.
As for the two problems:

1) Yes, veggies are artificially determined, and that's no good. But, it's maybe better to have such a hard and artificial division than introducing complicated rules which can result in adding no more than the complexity of the rule itself.
There is a fact, on the other hand. It don't seems to me that there are in the macroscopic world many examples of a continuum between vegetables (autotrophs) and non vegetables. But maybe in the microscopic world things are much different, I don't know.
So, if we want robots to move gradually between auto and heterotrophy, we should accept the existence of robots which, at the same time, feed through photosynthesis AND hunt for food; otherwise, why should we introduce a model allowing such continuum, and at the same time put in it a number of deterrences to make practical to be only in the extreme positions of the continuum?

2) the energy problem. Here again you're right. There's no methabolism, and the energy parameter is extremely simplistic (by the way, never found irritating that a dying robot with, say, 300 energy,  has all the speed and reaction capability of a fully healthy bot?). Maybe a "multiple container" system would be interesting. You may have a few different parameters, with different characteristics, and let the robot transform one type into the other at slow rates (say, no more than a fixed token per cycle). Anyway, my advice is to try to keep that system the more simple and abstract as possible, purging it from the "organic" nomenclature (fats, carbs, etc) so to make clear what exactly the system is and what it does (otherwise, you'll always be tempted to add features which are "name driven": for example, that fats _should_ make you slow or, being "greasy", _must_ have something to do with slime, etc - hope you get what I mean). Parallelism with real systems may come after, just as a convenient metaphore of the system.

Ok. I'm going away for holidays tomorrow (to Irkutsk!) and I'll be away till the beginning of August. So, goodbye for now, have a nice time. Don't change too much in DB while I'm away !  :lol:

Endy:
Just out of curriosity how hard would it be to have a sort of max system nrg bank that supplies nrg to the plants but can only refill as nrg is wasted or spent? Various costs and wasted shots would fill the bank while veggies gaining nrg would lower it.

If either bots (or plants) desire additional nrg they'll have to figure out a method to extract it from others either via feeding, or perhaps clever evasion/defence causing opponent nrg loss.

The only problem I could see would be keeping track of all the expenditures, I'm sure it would pose something of a difficulty.

On the topic of leaving shooting veggies alone to evolve. The most common occurance I've seen is that they all stop fighting and settle down to peaceful immortality.

Hmm...we have these guys become immortal than complain about our boredom, I can't imagine how bad it'll be when we achieve it for ourselves. ;)

Endy B)

Numsgil:
It wouldn't be terribly difficult.  It would just take a bit of time to program.  There are alot of places that bots lose nrg.

I wouldn't be against it as an option.  It creates a kind of zero sum game, which has some different strategies than non zero sum game.  (Look up zero sum game on wikipedia to see what I mean).

PurpleYouko:
That is the way it used to work. IMO it was a serious pain in the ass and severely limited the program. It just isn't realistic to have a fixed maximum energy level in the system.

One of my first acts as primary programmer after Carlo published the code was to trash the system and make the game more open ended.

It is trivial to keep track of total energy in the system and stop veggie feeding. Unfortunately it leads to some extremely problematic issues like veggies being fed negative energy tokens when your robots get too efficient at conserving energy.

We can add this as an option possibly but I don't favor the idea of making it the default.  :(

Numsgil:

--- Quote ---We can add this as an option possibly but I don't favor the idea of making it the default.  :(
--- End quote ---
I would second that.  I don't believe ecological systems are zero-sum generally.

What might be better (and I started working on it) is to allow new ways to feed vegs instead of just a constant amount.  Feed vegs based on body or surface area, etc.

What we need to get is an ecological balance where vegs don't have to be repoped all the time.  Get some realistic predator/prey cycles.

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