New 2 the forum

[Ispettore]

Hi everyone I'm new to the forum but not to the program! It's like 2 months I've been in darwinbots, and finally I'm starting understanding something   . Sorry for my english but I'm italian; I wanted to say my praises to the darwinbot's programmers: you did a great job! The program offers unlimited possibilities! I've seen that the forum is almost dead, so I said "better to register", because a so great program can't be forgot.
Now I wanted to talk you about an evolution: I had some swarm bots (last version) and I put them with other species in a tank with alga runaways and minimalis as food, ad w\o corpses nor waste. It had normal costs, only a 0.01 more cumulative cost for the age and 3 for the shoot (to avoid ever-shooters) and 32x mutations (lol). Of course, only the swarms survived, and the runaways. But great was my wonder when I saw an alga developing a shooting tecnique (first enc). After a little, all the algae was so, and later like the second enc. So the swarm evolved: it started forming ties!!! And of course it survived, but the ties seems to do nothing. It's strange. Try to help me, like I said I'm a newbie. Sadly, after a pair of hours, the algae evolved in a too-fast rotating specie, and the echosistem died . Please take a look at my swarm tie!

[Numsgil]

Welcome!  Forum isn't really dead, but it's been livlier.  Interest waxes and wanes over time.

Evolution in Darwinbots is extremely open ended, as no doubt you've seen.  This means that usually it's pretty difficult to really undestand the dynamics that are at play.  Often you'll see a new behavior.  It might be an actual adaptation that makes the bot stronger, or it might just be a random mutation that gets spread from sheer luck.  Especially when the population sizes are as small as they are, you'll often see random luck outweighing most other forces.

The secret to evo sims is extreme patience.  It's better to have mutation rates too low than too high.  Then you have to just sit still and let the program run for millions of cycles.

[Ispettore]

I know that mayor of evolution are of non-sense or also weakens the bots, but I thought that 'cos after swarm gained this ability he started growing in population (against the ever-bad algae) it had to be an improvement.

[Peter]

I know that mayor of evolution are of non-sense or also weakens the bots, but I thought that 'cos after swarm gained this ability he started growing in population (against the ever-bad algae) it had to be an improvement.

The only way you know it is an inprovement, the attemp to adept to the enviroment, is simple enough is to put the original bot and the (e)volved bot into a new sim together with 'the ever-bad algae' and look who does better.

And yes most of the mutations are bad, I have once let a sim go with low mutation rates after the bots had something like 50 or 60 mutations, it went pretty slow. I compared the old woth the new and somehow there wheren't much differences with slight diffences in repro nrg for example, most other mutations have somehow didn't do anything becouse there wasn't much difference in the DNA before and after.
That was strange becouse there where 50 chances in a small dna of something about 60 orso.  

And this forum isn't dead, this forum isn't even thinking about going dead as long Numsgil is around, he is the one who is mostly active on the forum.Good Numsgil he will alway anwser your questions.

Further there is on most days atleast a few posts, or am I looking on the wrong dates  .

[Ispettore]

I tried to put it toghether with swarm and another but different mutated swarm and only the shooting algae as food. Everybody died but swarm tie2 survived; I repeated it some times and the result is always the same.
The strange, as I said, is that ties seems to do nothing (except bringing the tied bot with the tieing one), maybe it is just a coincidence. Is possible that my bot will learn tie-feeding?
PS: I was very interested in the ant bot, but noone from the posted in the forum works. Has somebody got a similiar bot? I mean, with different works for each one of them (I use v 2.43, last one)