Author Topic: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic  (Read 40340 times)

Offline scood

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #15 on: April 07, 2007, 10:20:13 AM »
ty

gosh zerobots take so long to evolve, its been 81 milleon cycles and there still not doing anythin but spin around

oh and my sim is going 3000 cycles per second with 8 zerobot vegies

Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #16 on: April 08, 2007, 06:54:59 AM »
It's not so much a matter of time, as it is the properties of your simulation.  Simply put, just throwing some bots with 0s in their DNA into a sim and running it for ever probably won't work.  You need the environment to carefully sculpt the bot through evolution.  It's very much like growing a bonsai tree.

Offline scood

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #17 on: April 08, 2007, 11:42:57 AM »
yes however

I dont know how to guide the evolution of being able to reproduce, and from there I could do this

Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #18 on: April 09, 2007, 07:10:03 PM »
There should be information on how to get started scattered in various threads.  Simply put, you want an open and error free environment for your bots.  You don't want them to randomly get themselves killed.  Once you get a decent base going, you turn up the heat so to speak, and jack up costs.

Offline MacadamiaNuts

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #19 on: April 14, 2007, 11:11:49 AM »
One trick I like is to use high copy mutations instead of high point mutations to speed it up.

Then you place the bot in the middle of energy spraying vegs, set speed to 0 and manually reproduce it (killing the old ones) until you get a reproducer. Then replace the vegs by zero vegs and let it go.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2007, 11:12:30 AM by MacadamiaNuts »
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Offline kage

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #20 on: April 17, 2007, 05:17:24 PM »
Can we jack up mutations really high to let them evolve really quickly?

Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #21 on: April 18, 2007, 02:17:56 AM »
Jacking up mutation rates does more to randomize DNA than it does to improve evolutionary speed.  If you're looking to pick a first replicator quickly, it's a viable strategy.  But for a long term approach towards a specific goal, it's not a good plan.

Offline Endy

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #22 on: April 18, 2007, 02:32:09 AM »
Can't just jack mutations up and expect evolution to work faster(onetime exception see below). You need a balance of reproduction, mutations, and selection to have evolution.

Edit: Nums beat me to it  

I'll normally raise the mutation rates in the Mutations Panel for awhile.. Mainly it just serves to make tons of mostly junk dna come into existance at the initial start. When some of the junk turns out to allow reproduction I turn the rates back down to allow true evolution to take hold.

You could also seed the sim with veggies(animal zero bots) that both give nrg and trigger repro and/or mrepro. Don't recommend actually using it with most versions though   I've had dnaless bots appear that exploit this to become both immortal and reproductive.

Its possible to speed up the process even more with some human logic... kind of unsporting, but you can add in multiple duplicates of probably useful dna ie. 50 300 -1 7 314 rnd 5 and so on. None of it actually does anything at first, but an inserted store/inc/dec will have a much higher chance of producing "life".

My own belief is that the beginning of life had to have at least some of these conditions occur. Pretty cool that we're simulating the beginnings of life itself.

I still have some concerns on dna "leakage", it's always technically possible for human created functional dna to enter the zerobot. Be better if we could create bots with dna that can't interact with the rest of the sim.
« Last Edit: April 18, 2007, 02:55:23 AM by Endy »

Offline googlyeyesultra

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #23 on: July 13, 2007, 12:03:41 AM »
Can we make it start like this?

cond
A bunch of random numbers.
start
A bunch of random numbers.
stop

cond
A bunch of random numbers.
start
A bunch of random numbers.
stop

...

end

It'd probably evolve quite a bit faster.
« Last Edit: July 13, 2007, 12:04:00 AM by googlyeyesultra »

Offline Testlund

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #24 on: July 14, 2007, 12:11:04 PM »
If you put any DNA code manually in the bot you won't be able to compete for the Evolutionary Price. It must be computer generated. Somebody provided a link here somewhere so you can get randomly generated code if you don't want to use zeros. Maybe it should be a sticky. I'm eager to try that out soon.
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Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #25 on: July 14, 2007, 10:44:07 PM »
Yeah, I definitely think providing any sort of structure is cheating.

Offline googlyeyesultra

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #26 on: July 15, 2007, 01:12:56 AM »
It's tempting to just use the program to generate a bunch of randomize dna's, and see if any of them are remotely close to conditional logic. Then just evolve those. Still, that would probably be considered cheating as well...

I'm a lot better at finding ways around the rules than actually doing the challenge.

Offline cliftut

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #27 on: August 03, 2007, 12:07:57 AM »
I don't think that would be cheating... if you can come up with conditional logic in less than 50 years by randomizing stats, go for it! ^^; Although I don't think you would be able to tell if they were "close" to conditional logic, because either they have it, or they don't.

Once I get used to DB and understand some of this better, I might give this a shot. I have a slight bit of experience with a game that evolved conditional logic using neural networks, and I think I could use a similar approach to "teaching" them in DB as I did in the other game. I'm not sure if the other program had the conditional logic conveniently coded into the learning mechanism, though... probably did.

Anyway, this seems interesting, so I might attempt this after I've gotten acquainted with the program.

I think the best way to do it would be to pick what sort of conditional logic you want, then gradually work up to a situation in which they have to use it or die! Bwahaha!

Is manual bot-killing allowed? I'm not sure if it would help much, but I just want to know.
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Offline googlyeyesultra

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #28 on: August 03, 2007, 12:39:55 AM »
I think it is, ya. I'm taking a semi-serious shot at this. Also, one alternative to help "teach" the bots to do a couple of things while giving them energy: set some costs (like stores, movement, whatever) to a negative value (so the bot receives energy for doing them) and then put some other type of cost on (age, dna, whatever). This'll help evolve them towards including some .up and store commands in their dna.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2007, 12:48:03 AM by googlyeyesultra »

Offline Trafalgar

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Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
« Reply #29 on: August 03, 2007, 10:35:33 AM »
So far the most evolved bots I've gotten fire constantly while moving forwards. This is not so good for evolution, however, as they kill each other off rather quickly. Plus I haven't evolved reproduction yet either.

I have tried another approach - starting with a massive genome of all 0s (15k dna length), with shepherd bots (who replace algae and do gain energy as veggies) who go around checking bots and rewarding them with energy based on their DNA length, among other things. Unfortunately, there are a few problems:

1. The bots are not spending enough energy since they're by and large doing nothing, so they're sitting at 29-30k energy all the time.
2. If I have constant-shooting bots in the sim, the shepherds wander into their line of fire and get killed (despite having maxed out shell and a large body). There's no time to react to the shot and flee because when they walk into the stream they get hit by 10+ shots at once. Shepherd death and replacement results in energy rewards not being given due to how I had to implement the only-give-energy-every-so-often system to get around robage and refage being useless after 30k cycles.

Hmm, perhaps having the shepherds trigger mrepro on the other bots if they're above 5k energy would be useful.