Why is there not a .veg?

[EricL]

Is there some reason/history there isn't a .veg or some other definitive way for a bot to tell it (or more critically, another bot) is or is not a veggy?

I would use this to prevent my preditor bots from targeting veggies in my evo sim.

Battery bots or others could use this for veggy ID purposes as opposed to the round-about veggy detection I've seen in some veggy ID genes....

If this is intentional, I expect the reason has to do with delibertly making it difficult to determine who is a veggy and who is not I.e. encouraging the development/evolution of sophsiticated logic and/or an arms race where becuase there is no way to be sure, bots have to compete with better and better veggy ID logic and evolved veggies can code to defeat such IDing.  One might argue that combat bots or evolved bots compete with each other through better and better veggy ID genes, but in practice, IDing a veggy in a combat sim is either not done at all (I.e. kill everything) or is done through a simple set of tests (such as *.refkills 0 =. *.refnrg X >, etc.) which pretty much always work since the veggy is not coded/allowed to try to defeat such tests (and I know of no situation where a combat bots wants to pretend to be a veggy).   I can't seem to think of a combination of refvars my preditors could use to avoid targeting veggies that my evobots could not evolve to mimic.  You might say that's a good thing, but I don't want to overpopulate the sim.  I need my preditors to always be able to tell veggies from evobots...  

Since veggy status cannot currently be changed by the bot - a bot is set at sim start time to be either a veggy or not - and few people code veggies for combat and to my knowledge, none have been evolved to the point where this matters, I'm not sure I follow the logic in not having this given the way veggies work today.

If being a veggy or not was an evolvable trait and/or a bot could choose to be a veggy (IMHO, the system should require a sacrifice for this way of life, like disabling voluntary movement) then I could see the piont in not having a black and white veggy ID system since there would not be a bright line between veggies and non veggies.  But that line exists today for all intents and purposes....

Comments?  Adding a .veg sysvar would be trivial and have neglible perf impact...

[googlyeyesultra]

Make sure that the bot can tell if itself is a veggie, too. Make it .veg and .refveg.

[EricL]

I would probalby make it just .veg.  Other bots could read it via .memloc .memval...

[Numsgil]

I'm not in favor of this, for reasons I talk about here.  To add quickly here though,

1.  I don't like yes/no sysvars.
2.  There's a system set up but not coded yet that would help blur the line between veg and animal.  A .veg sysvar in this case wouldn't work very well.

[EricL]

Fair enough.  We will put this on hold until we implement the new veggy paradym.

[Jez]

Agree with Nums and imperfection;

While I do feel there should be something that makes a veggie different from a bot beyond the autotroph setting I don't think it should be a refsysvar.

Consider the problems plants/fungi can cause, from an evolutionary standpoint, I imagine it should be a big battle, plants have the sunlight advantage, bots have different advantages, some win, some lose but like the old cancer veg we used to be bugged by the option of winning should be open to all.

[Testlund]

If that sysvar would be included I think a bot that evolves a .veg gene should have autotroph turned on for it, while a bot without the gene should have autotroph turned off. Also that would require that when you start a zerobot sim you would have to have a .veg gene or make sure you have the sim full of feeders.