Author Topic: Darwinbots enzyme system  (Read 41199 times)

Offline Ulciscor

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Darwinbots enzyme system
« Reply #75 on: July 02, 2005, 10:55:06 PM »
This may be an idiotic question but why would you want to blur the line between veggies and animals?
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Offline PurpleYouko

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« Reply #76 on: July 03, 2005, 11:32:07 AM »
Because without the line being blurred there is no way for a plant to evolve into an animal or vice versa.

All the earliest life on this planet was neither. What we see today as plant or animal are the pinacle of evolutionary progress to find exploitable niches.

It should be possible to create a primitive life form that lives in an anaerobic simulation and gradually creates oxygen from the environment around it. Later, other lifeforms should be able to adapt to use that oxygen in metabolic processes. others should evolve to feed on each other while some develop the ability to take energy from light and become plants.

Just to have a button that magically gives a robot energy from the environment is simply not realistic. Up until now it has been a necessary evil but we now have a system worked out that will make it superfluous. The robots need realistic and believable mechanisms by which to derive energy.

Even today we have some hybrid animal/plant species. Take the venus fly trap, Sundew or Pitcher plant
All of these species require protein from insects in order to suplement their photosynthesis.
Presently we cannot model this kind of behaviour in DB. But I for one would like to.
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Offline Ulciscor

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« Reply #77 on: July 03, 2005, 01:18:24 PM »
Organisms which use different enzymes etc would be multi-cellular wouldn't they?
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Offline Botsareus

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« Reply #78 on: July 03, 2005, 01:23:00 PM »
I would like to add that you should try to evolve robots along side with plants in the current system. As a long run you will see that in the current system this kind of evolution will be inpossible because there is no balance between vegs. and animals. What will happen is the vegs will addapt to be simply as good as the animals and kill them off.

The other problem is the problem with the "FirstBot" Right now to create a firstbot I have to use two genes witch include a feeding reproduction and movment code.

Solution:
In the future system all I will need is a reproduction code and some enzymes. The robot will even choose what it wants to do first tie feed or shoot, move or turn etc.

(My goal with FirstBot is to have somthing as premative as possible to evolve into somthing as advanced as possible)

P.S.

Excuse horable spelling if any.


Multiselluer?
No , but who knows.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2005, 01:23:48 PM by Botsareus »

Offline PurpleYouko

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« Reply #79 on: July 03, 2005, 05:34:34 PM »
Quote
Organisms which use different enzymes etc would be multi-cellular wouldn't they?
Not any more so than now. Enzymes are present in single celled creatures as well. Possibly greater efficiency with MBs though.

Making decent MBs is also something we are trying to make easier in the new release. Balance is a big deal. We can't just arbitrarily make something only available as MB.

Quote
Solution:
In the future system all I will need is a reproduction code and some enzymes. The robot will even choose what it wants to do first tie feed or shoot, move or turn etc.

Please note that enzymes are NOT directly controlled by the genes. Or at least do not need to be.
The enzymes for a particular robot will be determined at that robot's birth and will be subject to mutation. No active control necessary! If we allow gene control then any robot can make all enzymes and that would really suck.

At least that is the point I was arguing for all along and where I thought we had ended up. Please correct me if I am wrong here. It was a while ago.
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Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #80 on: July 03, 2005, 06:39:44 PM »
Quote
Organisms which use different enzymes etc would be multi-cellular wouldn't they?
That's more the job of the specialization, which rewards bots for purposely limiting what they do.  It's somewhat related to the idea of enzymes.  You'd have to read through alot of the posts to see why or how.

Offline Ulciscor

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« Reply #81 on: July 04, 2005, 08:11:13 PM »
Isn't it difficult enough already to get a bot to evolve to be better at something? Isn't it going to take a long time for a veggie to evolve? And does this mean you will remove the .fix vars? Sorry if this has been gone over already, I have looked back and if it's there I have missed it.

[Edit] And speaking of arbitrary decisions, what about making it cheaper for multi-bots to produce poison and venom, etc? That has no actual basis in the sim apart from introducing an artificial advantage for single bots to become multi-botular.
« Last Edit: July 04, 2005, 08:13:10 PM by Ulciscor »
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Offline PurpleYouko

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« Reply #82 on: July 05, 2005, 09:02:19 AM »
Quote
And speaking of arbitrary decisions, what about making it cheaper for multi-bots to produce poison and venom, etc? That has no actual basis in the sim apart from introducing an artificial advantage for single bots to become multi-botular.

Already done!

Been there for ages!  :)

It is cheaper for MBs to do everything! All costs are divided by the number of ties currently attached to any give multi-bot cell.

PS Your avatar is doing its best to lock up my PC. It is grabbing 100% of my CPU resources whenever I scroll the page to show it. As soon as I scroll it off page it goes back to normal.
How weird is that?  :blink:
It has never done it before.
« Last Edit: July 05, 2005, 09:05:11 AM by PurpleYouko »
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Offline Ulciscor

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« Reply #83 on: July 05, 2005, 10:24:19 AM »
Sorry I phrased it wrong. I meant, what is the basis for making multibots able to access poison and venom for less energy? If it is just there to give multibots and advantage over other bots, so that it is more likely that multibots will evolve or survive, that is artificially introduced and doesn't arise from a deeper level of the program.

Argh everything I seem to make locks up someone's pc. My avatar is quite a large gif file which might explain it. I'll change it now.
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Offline shvarz

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« Reply #84 on: July 05, 2005, 03:07:44 PM »
Carlo,

I would certainly love a system like that.  But there are problems too.  Your system would allow a large number of possible molecules and reactions, but we don't need a large number of molecules and reactions at this point.  They would only slow things down.  Like with DNA language: you allow mutations to generate only meaninful commands (add->sub), because allowing mutations that generate meaningless commands (add->bdd, or sub->wub) would simply slow things down without giving anyting new.  

Same here.  The goal was not to create the whole metabolism from scratch, but give bots more choices on how they obtain energy and how they spend it.  The first and foremost effect of that would be the blurred line between veggies and non-veggies.  Bots could evolve to become either.  The second effect is that bots can become a lot more diverse: they can be lean and muscular or they can be slow and fat or they can be large and tough  (and any variation in between).

We still could go with a system of rules at this point, but there is a problem of balance.  How much should it cost to make fat?  Protein? Carb?  How efficient each one is?  Where do you get these numbers.  Taking them from real biochemistry is an easy solution - all energy costs can be expressed as ATPs and converted into nrg.
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Offline PurpleYouko

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« Reply #85 on: July 05, 2005, 04:12:04 PM »
Quote
Argh everything I seem to make locks up someone's pc. My avatar is quite a large gif file which might explain it. I'll change it now.

I like your new one better anyway.  ;)
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Offline Carlo

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« Reply #86 on: July 06, 2005, 03:53:21 AM »
Shvarz,

you can write any program with the dna language. Mutations don't allow _syntactically_ uncorrect sequences to appear, but allow any possible correct sequence. If the chemical system should work like that, then it should avoid the specification of reactions like:

abc + xyz -> aaa

(let's say that this reaction is syntactically wrong as there are 3 a on the right and only one on the left side, and the other atoms disappeared - therefore the reaction is simply impossible, the expression has no meaning).

What you are saying, instead, is that we should avoid reactions which are _semantically_ wrong, I.e., work but have no evident meaning. That's exactly the opposite of the DB philosophy.


Quote
The first and foremost effect of that would be the blurred line between veggies and non-veggies.  Bots could evolve to become either.  The second effect is that bots can become a lot more diverse: they can be lean and muscular or they can be slow and fat or they can be large and tough  (and any variation in between).

See, that's exactly what I mean. Just read your statement, and count the degrees of freedom that this new system will add to DarwinBots:

1)  veg <-> non-veg
2)  lean <-> fat
3)  weak <-> muscular ?

What else? Probably some more, but now, by contrast, try to count the degrees of freedom the DNA gives to robots: impossible!
See (I'm sorry to be sooo boring), that's the difference between selecting syntax or selecting semantics. If you select syntax, you don't know what to expect. If you select semantics, you already know you'll get what you selected.

Offline PurpleYouko

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« Reply #87 on: July 06, 2005, 08:42:43 AM »
Carlo

I'm not quite sure I am following your argument here.
It sounds like you are saying that it is a bad thing to.....

1) blur the line between veggies and animals and allow almost infinite gradiations between the two extremes.
2) Allow the bots to choose which to build in their bodies, carbs, fats, proteins, muscles etc.
3) Allow the make up of a body to have a profound effect on the way that the particular bot behaves. fat = slow and heavy. Muscular = faster and stronger. Lean = fast but light and so on

These changes won't take anything away from the DNA but will add a massive amount of diversity to DB. Possibly equal to or even greater than that given by the DNA alone in the present system.

As far as the chemical reactions go, I am with you on this. I don't think we even need to bother defining the exact chemical pathways to create energy and convert one thing to the other.
It should be as simple as this.

In the presence of one instance of enzyme A and the right kind of food then X amount of energy is given to the robot and Y amount of waste is produced.

If the enzyme is for extracting energy from sunlight then we can go one step further possibly.
In the presence of one instance of Enzyme P (for photosynthesis), sunlight and CO2 then energy is given to the robot in proportion to the intensity of the sunlight, X molecules of CO2 become X molecules of O2 and X molecules of Cellulose in the body of the robot

In other words, using photosynthesis will make the robot heavier and slower automatically but it gets free energy in proportion to the amount of sun and the number of full copies of enzyme P in the bit pattern.

I don't see the point of modelling all the reactions and even allowing useless ones. A kind of overview should be sufficient in my opinion.
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Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #88 on: July 06, 2005, 03:23:45 PM »
Quote
I don't see the point of modelling all the reactions and even allowing useless ones. A kind of overview should be sufficient in my opinion.
At first I felt the exact opposite on this issue, but as I started into the technical details, I found it's simply unrealistic to model more than maybe 100 substances or so.  The memory requirements alone aren't large enough.

So we'll probably need a more abstract model, where glucose converts to nrg and vice versa via a single enzyme.

Offline Botsareus

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« Reply #89 on: July 06, 2005, 04:06:46 PM »
Quote
See, that's exactly what I mean. Just read your statement, and count the degrees of freedom that this new system will add to DarwinBots:

1) veg <-> non-veg
2) lean <-> fat
3) weak <-> muscular ?

What else? Probably some more, but now, by contrast, try to count the degrees of freedom the DNA gives to robots: impossible!

Carlo, no one is planning to get rid of the dna , it is still very important in this system.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2005, 04:08:07 PM by Botsareus »