Author Topic: Maca's ecosystem challenge  (Read 6430 times)

Offline Numsgil

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Maca's ecosystem challenge
« Reply #15 on: September 28, 2007, 11:41:08 PM »
Reading the topic so far, shvarz's last idea here is what immediately jumped out at me.  In an asexual world especially, lineage distance and genetic distance are strongly related.  Doesn't address viruses, though...

Update the way robot IDs work so that it's next to impossible for bots born in different sims to have the same ID.  Off the top of my head, the easiest way would be to add another prefix field that remembers a hash of the internet user's name.  Ideally there'd be a way to find a hash unique for each hardware (ie: each computer).

Then bots can be saved with their phylogenic tree in the .dbo file, in a way that's universal to the intersim.  Since bots are asexual, this can just be a single list of numbers as long as the number of generations.  Sort of like the Abel, son of Zakia, son of Rashar... in the Bible.  Also store the number of mutations each generation represents, to help determining which strains are "original" and which are "offshoots".

When the number of individuals in a species in the local sim share a too distant common ancestor (you could pretty easily check the common ancestor every 1000 cycles or so), you'd perform some clustering algorithm and define n new strains based on more reasonable common ancestors, keeping the least mutated (as counted based on the number of generations each cycle) strain as the "original".

As for viruses, you'd have to figure them into the metric for determining the "distance".  Maybe figure in like 10 phantom generations per infection, or something like that.  Viruses mess up phylogenic trees in real life, too.
« Last Edit: September 28, 2007, 11:45:00 PM by Numsgil »