General > Biology

natural diversity VS simulated

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viplex:

--- Quote from: EricL ---On the contrary, it's all about processor speed.  The more megaflops, the more physics that can be supportted, the more complex the interactions can be, the more bot-cycles per second per sim, etc.
--- End quote ---

you are right, but my point is...
if you have nothing interesting evolved in half an hour in your sim, processor time will not solve the problem, just like waiting for some hours more wont solve it. This late being an experience of mine.
So okay, this "completely irrelevant" is a bit exagerrated

Endy:
EricL, what kinds of settings are you using. I've found making the enviroment more complicated, yields substantial benefits in terms of more relativly complex life evolving. Oh yeah, what species is the zero bot? For plants they tend towards evolving pacifistic/defensive forms, rather than agressive ones.

I've found starting with a highly developed bot will work wonders. While evolution may take a long time to evolve things, it's easy for it to modify them to fit the enviroment.

Your choice of plants can also have a huge impact. An evolving continually reproducing plant, will adapt to your animals' feeding methods making them adapt in turn.

Jez:
I chose time originally over space because of the length of time that evolution has been around, the excessive time it took for life to mutate beyond a unicellular point and because there are small enclosed areas, such as caves, that do hold a variety of life, albeit a limited variety.

Watching a bit of 'State of the Planet - David Attenborough - UKTV History' today did make me reconsider this point though. He referred to an effect that mankind is having on biodiversity known as 'islandisation'.  Basically; the detrimental affect that something as simple as a road through a jungle can have by dividing the natural environment into smaller parcels.
For instance there is a little bird that steals insects from army ants, the army ants need a large amount of jungle to survive, when the army ants run out of insects in their bit of jungle they are quite happy to cross the road to find more insects but the bird, never having had a lesson on road safety, won't.
All along these man made boundaries both the plant and animal diversity is lessened.

Weigh this against an animal heavyweight such as the crocodile, a reptile that stopped evolving a long time ago because it had reached an apex for its environment.

If your bot has stopped evolving I would suggest a quick game of 'Darwin’s Finches'. Change the environment, if it has stopped mutating then it probably (having reached the ‘crocodile point’) doesn't need to any more.

I am changing my original answer from time, (although important in its own right) to space, environment and genetic pool.

PS
In Africa, many of the original game reserves are now considered too small, the solution they are now thinking about is joining many of these game reserves using ‘corridors’, much like the affect hedgerows used to have on biodiversity here in England and the reason that we now have laws about the removal of hedgerows.
This reminds me of the internet sharing idea that has never been fully implemented, diverse environments joined by an internet pipeline.

viplex:

--- Quote from: Jez ---This reminds me of the internet sharing idea that has never been fully implemented, diverse environments joined by an internet pipeline.
--- End quote ---

That's an interesting idea, but
There is an evo software the name of which I dont remember, with rotating, stiff-body bots called "biots". Internet sharing works fot it. I evolved some cool biots and connected to other enviroments (to 4 directions, via borders of the screen). What do you think happened? There came some tens of thousands generations old terminators and quickly eliminated my whole population.
But if there was some way to standardize enviromental parameters, and then defining some kind of fitness for the creatures involved in the multiPC sim, then screens with close average fitness could be put next to each other, thus creating a great world of adjoining screens. That should elongate stability.

viplex:

--- Quote from: Endy ---Your choice of plants can also have a huge impact. An evolving continually reproducing plant, will adapt to your animals' feeding methods making them adapt in turn.
--- End quote ---

I always use auto-repopulation for plants because genetic reproduction never works for me somehow: the population is wildly oscillating (when reaches max pop treshold, too many vegs reproduce at the same time) and many other issues I can't recall now. How do you set up a stabile veggy pop? Do the plants learn to move and shoot and things?

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