Bots and Simulations > Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims
Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
EricL:
I will buy the first person who can convince me they have evolved an organism that uses condtional logic from a zero bot ancestor a year's subscription to Scientific American (or your favorite magazine of comperable subscription cost). Price of delivery to non-US addresses included.
Rules:
Must be descended from a 0 bot (any length)
No contamination from human authored DNA. (If you use veggies with enabled DNA in your breeding sim, they must be restricted from mutating else they infect your bots with a virus containing their own human authored DNA).
Must demonstrate 'true' conditional logic I.e. they must 'delibertly' exhibit different behaviour under different circumstances. Winning examples might include tracking or targeting another bot, velocity matching with another bot, stopping within proximity of another bot (and starting again if the bot disappears), choosing different speeds under different nrg or environmental conditions, etc.
There is no requirement that bots actually evolve use of the cond statement or traditional gene structure.
Examples which do not qualify include (but are not limited to) useful but non-conditional cyclic or periodic behaviour (e.g. reproducing, shooting, turning every N cycles). To win, your bot must have evolved DNA which makes a decision based upon some environmental input.
For this first contest, I will allow trigger logic such as reproduction when nrg is above a certain level. The logic must truly be conditional however and must be present in the DNA I.e. a bot which attempts to reproduce every cycle but only does so when it has body > 2 becuase the simulator requires this does not count.
To win, you must post a sim which demonstrates the claimed behaviour, provide an explanation and reverse engineer the relevant evolved DNA.
Good luck!
Jez:
V nice!
Does that mean you will open a bestiary/zerobot bit of the forum for me to record posted efforts?
I only have two by MaN's atm but you never know... (point out any I have missed etc etc)
How can we tell if a ZB is true or contaminated? (beyond author honesty) I would love to see this hard coded in some way (including a default enviroment that ZB's should aim for), ZB's are very much in line with what Carlo originally intended!
EricL:
Let's have people post submissions for the prize as a reply on this topic. In fact, let's make that a requirement. A link to another topic in the reply is fine, but no changes to the submission once the reply is made on this topic. Submissions will be taken in order, thus if there are multiple entries, the first one to reply on this topic with a winning entry will be the winner (though if there are multiple, unrelated winning submissions with a few days of each other, I will consider awarding multiple prizes).
If we need a besatiary/zerbot topic area in general, I would be happy to create it.
I have no concerns regarding the honesty and integrity of everyone in this forum. A certain kind of natural selection is in operation.
I designate myself as the finial voice (this time) on inadvertant contamination or rules technicalities, though opinions from the peanut gallery will be given strong consideration. For example, Maca's Five-0 zerobots are descended from a first ancestor which contained a start and an end. While technically a violation of the rules (starting bots should be all 0's and nothing else) I deem descendents from this common ancestor to be elligable for the prize (this time).
Regarding default ZB environments, that is a complex subject which deserves it's own topic. In my opinion, it is possible to evolve winners using radically different environments and the environments themselves may need to be modified by the human during different breeding stages to provide new and different selection pressures as evolution proceeds. Thus, for the contest, any environment may be used and environments may be changed as deemed necessary along the way by the human subject to the rules above (in particular, any organism with hand authored DNA added to the sim as part of the enviroment must have mutations disabled).
Numsgil:
I can attest that a static environment with modest costs at the beginning isn't the way to go. I have a sim in the hundreds of millions of cycles and nothing noteworthy.
MacadamiaNuts:
Would any amount of repeats of this:
0 499 999
999 499 0
qualify as a valid "zerobot"? Those are unused sysvars, as far as I know, and mutations would spread better through the whole sysvar range instead of favouring the lower values.
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