Author Topic: Evolved tie-bot...  (Read 2572 times)

Offline cliftut

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Evolved tie-bot...
« on: August 04, 2007, 10:47:25 PM »
This bot evolved from the 2.1 version of T_Preservans. Whilst entangled in a fight versus some evolving veggies, This lucky guy happened to gain the ability to throw ties (it tends to favor tieing it's buddies). I'll attach a simfile so that you people can see what it does.

I've found that the seemingly ideal environment for this bot is one in which the veggies aren't fixed. This means that grabbing the veggies via ties makes them easier to hit.

There are some problems with this behavior, so even in the sim I designed for them they tend to drop the tieing ability after a while. I'll list them;
1. When they tie to other bots they fight, trying to pull in different directions. Useless spinning motions and chaotic motion result, making it difficult to feed.
2. Once they are tied to a veggie, they tend to end up facing away from the veggie, making their constant shots useless until either a link is broken, or it links to other veggies/bots causing it to change orientation.
3. They end up cannibotting by accident because their ties force them to face one another. When too many bots get linked together (this often happens when feeding, because the children tend to get netted by their parents or other nearby bots, putting them or their parents in the line of fire)
4. Overall free swimming non-tying bots seem superior, so evolution tends to work against the tieing until it disappears from the genome.

There are some good points, though.
1. Once enough veggies have been netted, the bots can feast and multiply quickly.
2. If a more efficient feeding method was introduced, a bot that netted its food could have an advantage since the veggies are free-floating.


I would like to see if any interesting behaviors can be evolved from this. If any of you could run the sim for yourself or experiment with it yourself, I'd be grateful. I would be very happy if anyone could suggest settings that would encourage further development of this tying behavior.

Also, is there any way to make the code more readably besides going through it manually? I'm a newbie, so I don't understand the code enough to tell what's doing something and whats not.  I heard someone mention a script that would remove all the junk code created by evolution, leaving only the functional parts. Anyone know anything about this?

Here is the code for the bot.
attached is a simulation file containing "Connectus Preservans" with free floating veggies and one with fixed veggies.

The way it attacks fixed veggies is interesting. If one of the bots manages to get enough energy from a veggie to reproduce, it usually ends up with both bots linked to each other and to the veggies. They continue to feed, wiping out the veggie patch they have attached to and rapidly reproducing, creating a large net of bots that completely engulfs the veggie patch, devouring it. Once the patch is gone, usually the bots start killing each other because they are so close together and all linked. The result is that the bots kill each other off until all that is left of that group are a few bots, usually tied together and circling pointlessly until one or two more die off. It's very interesting... I might make a video of it for those who don't want to test it themselves (or read all of this ;;).

Sorry for my rambling, but this interested me... if anyone else cares enough, feel free to ramble some yourself!
« Last Edit: August 04, 2007, 11:17:22 PM by cliftut »
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