Author Topic: 200 Hour Zerobot Sim  (Read 11166 times)

Offline JossiRossi

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 31
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« on: December 04, 2007, 01:54:41 AM »
I decided to start up a zerobot sim on my computer for the many hours a day I'm not using it. After a few false starts I think I have everything all set and going well.

I decided to do everything as default as I could and try to stick to what I could gather EricL had done. I created a zerobot dna file, which I think I did right, and started it up. First time I did something dumb I can;t recall now, but I restarted it. The second time I disabled eyes to speed the sim up, I then attempted to turn eyes back on and either due to me missing something, or the option not being available I was unable to and started fresh.

Other info I have is that I do hourly saves, this will hopefully not be as necessary later on, but I'm not really short on drive space so I'm keeping them. All my bots are autotrophs with all characteristics active (dna execution, reproduction, virus vulnerable ect).

After 40 hours the bots have been building up some nice mutations each one having on average 148 mutations.

So after 40 hours I have noticed a little hurdle. No big deal really but something I have to keep an eye out for. Bots are learning to shoot far before reproducing. With them being autotrophs they basically can shoot nearly unlimitedly, and as a result the second a single "spiral shooty death" bot evolves it manages to kill all the bots and then itself dies as it shoots more than it takes in as a plant.

So right now every so often I check to see if my bots have been decimated, reload my saves and then if I see the bot before it has done anything bad I save it, then kill it off and resume. Or if I find a save before the bot mutates into Spinny Death, I just let it go on from there.

One thing I could do is to make shooting prohibitively expensive but I feel I'll lose out on a lot if I do this. Any other suggestions as to how I can help keep a single bot from destroying everything, or should I just keep playing momma?
« Last Edit: December 19, 2007, 01:25:51 AM by JossiRossi »

Offline Testlund

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 1574
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #1 on: December 04, 2007, 03:58:04 AM »
It's always nice with more zerobot sims out there!  

If just one or few shooting bots manage to kill off all your bots I'm guessing you're running a sim that is too small. I would recommend starting with at least 500 bots (I started with 1000 bots and ran it for more than half a year) in a big field. It takes longer to run but it's rewarding if one is patient. You get more genetic material for interesting mutations to appear.

Also in the beginning it's good with morphological costs only, so to encourage reproduction first and other behavior later.

I suppose it doesn't matter much if you chose autotrophs or heterotrophs with energy shooters.
In my heterotroph sim though I found my bots have become more conservative with energy and do less. If I could just get a tie feeder or shooter.....
Also overfeeding is a little problem which can cause waste build-up and alzeimers; the bots ignore their dna instructions and do all sorts of crazy stuff.
You may want to set your waste treshold high if running such sim.
One could also make the energy shooters shoot a little less often, but I don't know how to write such bot yet. I guess using a timer or something.  
The internet is corrupt and controlled by criminally minded people.

Offline JossiRossi

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 31
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #2 on: December 04, 2007, 04:58:18 AM »
Quote from: Testlund
If just one or few shooting bots manage to kill off all your bots I'm guessing you're running a sim that is too small. I would recommend starting with at least 500 bots (I started with 1000 bots and ran it for more than half a year) in a big field. It takes longer to run but it's rewarding if one is patient. You get more genetic material for interesting mutations to appear.

I currently only have 250 bots going. This is partly because my computer really slows to a crawl when I get higher than that. But importantly, I'm using the largest field size available. If one of these shooter bots went on and was able to kill everything as it was, wouldn't having 250 more bots on the field just give it more to kill?

Quote
Also in the beginning it's good with morphological costs only, so to encourage reproduction first and other behavior later.

Good point. I adjusted that. I almost wonder if I should try to exact my vengeance on Rotation. A while back I did a run where I tried to remove rotating bots. I disliked that basically all bots just spun in circles and there was no real pressure to stop doing that. In essence it just gives each bot a 360 degree view and that bugs me for some unknown reason. It might just be I hate the eye indicator spinning around when you select bots =p I don't know how much I'd want to try to pressure that though even if I wanted.

Quote
I suppose it doesn't matter much if you chose autotrophs or heterotrophs with energy shooters.
In my heterotroph sim though I found my bots have become more conservative with energy and do less. If I could just get a tie feeder or shooter.....
Also overfeeding is a little problem which can cause waste build-up and alzeimers; the bots ignore their dna instructions and do all sorts of crazy stuff.
You may want to set your waste treshold high if running such sim.
One could also make the energy shooters shoot a little less often, but I don't know how to write such bot yet. I guess using a timer or something.  

Duly noted. There's still lots I don't fully understand about how the program works, so I try to avoid messing with the settings, but this is one I know I can do.

Offline Numsgil

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 7742
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #3 on: December 04, 2007, 09:22:33 AM »
Spinning bots bugged me at first too, but after a while I just got used to them and now I find it weird when a bot doesn't spin.  Assuming that the bots are in vacuum-like setting, which the physics would suggest, spinning is a great way to look around without spending much energy.

Of course, now that you can change the width of eye5, you don't need to spin at all.  Just get eye5 to do a full circle.

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #4 on: December 04, 2007, 11:04:01 AM »
Quote from: JossiRossi
The second time I disabled eyes to speed the sim up, I then attempted to turn eyes back on and either due to me missing something, or the option not being available I was unable to and started fresh.
The settings on the options dialog are not retroactive to extant individuals.  They only apply to new bots created by hand or by starting a new sim from that point.  Each bot has it's own set of everything - mutations probabilities, eye enablement, etc.  Once you set it for a species and hit go, each bot is it's own species essentially.

I've been thinking about ways to retroactivly make changes to extant bots by species, but that capability does not currently exist in the program.

Quote from: JossiRossi
Other info I have is that I do hourly saves, this will hopefully not be as necessary later on, but I'm not really short on drive space so I'm keeping them.
Of course, you can only save the last 10 if you like.  This saves on space.


Quote from: JossiRossi
So after 40 hours I have noticed a little hurdle. No big deal really but something I have to keep an eye out for. Bots are learning to shoot far before reproducing. With them being autotrophs they basically can shoot nearly unlimitedly, and as a result the second a single "spiral shooty death" bot evolves it manages to kill all the bots and then itself dies as it shoots more than it takes in as a plant.
You can use shapes for isolation to prevent total wipe out by one guy like this.  Or use everlasting nrg shots and corpse mode so that most of the lost nrg is recaptured in the sim.  Or use nrg shooting shepard bots to make up what your shooter takes.  I don't breed veggies.  My zerobots are hetertrophs and I give them nrg other wasy then free mana from heaven.  Using veggy repopulation of a single shepard or two with a long cooldown period will inject a flurry of nrg shots into the sim every X hundred cycles.

Quote from: JossiRossi
So right now every so often I check to see if my bots have been decimated, reload my saves and then if I see the bot before it has done anything bad I save it, then kill it off and resume. Or if I find a save before the bot mutates into Spinny Death, I just let it go on from there.
I've never done hand weeding.  It's essentially intelligent design.  I prefer to change the environment to avoid total extinction and just let it run.  You want shooting to evolve.  It encourages replication.  All you want to do IMHO is tweak the conditions so that total extinction isn't the end result which is only a concern in our tiny sims (not nature).  Eventually the shooter will become extinct or a replicator will emerge and you'll be off and running.

Quote from: JossiRossi
One thing I could do is to make shooting prohibitively expensive but I feel I'll lose out on a lot if I do this. Any other suggestions as to how I can help keep a single bot from destroying everything, or should I just keep playing momma?
Throw a few shapes into the mix.  Not many, like 4 largish ones is all.  Use a repopulating nrg shooting shepard with no sunshine and everlastign nrg shots.  It will shoot all it's nrg, then disappear.  Good luck and welcome aboard!
Many beers....

Offline Testlund

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 1574
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2007, 03:32:35 PM »
Quote from: JossiRossi
If one of these shooter bots went on and was able to kill everything as it was, wouldn't having 250 more bots on the field just give it more to kill?

Are you saying you got such a good shooter in just a 40 hours sim? It has never happend to me. So far I've only seen the occasional shooter evolve that just floots around in one spot, shooting in one direction only and hit a few bots that happens to drift by, then it dies because I have shot cost set to 1.
« Last Edit: December 04, 2007, 03:33:07 PM by Testlund »
The internet is corrupt and controlled by criminally minded people.

Offline Numsgil

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 7742
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #6 on: December 04, 2007, 03:43:32 PM »
That's probably the reason.  If there are any costs at all, bots usually don't get enough benefit to make up for the cost to keep the phenotype alive.

Offline JossiRossi

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 31
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #7 on: December 05, 2007, 01:30:54 AM »
Sadly I wish the bot were an awesome 40 hour hunter =p Oddly enough I managed to evolve 2 independent spinny death bots within about an hour of each other which was kinda cool. All they do though is spin in a circle and shoot constantly. They have little shot costs and are autotrophs so they pretty much live forever. But that's basically cheating.

EricL: For shepard bots or other ways to keep heterotrophs alive, what would you suggest for the beggining of a zerobot sim? Since they are essentially helpless for so incredibly long I want to make sure they have a chance to survive long enough to actually evolve.

I'll likely start of a new one as there's lots of good ideas for initial conditions that I think should be used.

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #8 on: December 05, 2007, 12:08:04 PM »
Quote from: JossiRossi
Sadly I wish the bot were an awesome 40 hour hunter =p Oddly enough I managed to evolve 2 independent spinny death bots within about an hour of each other which was kinda cool. All they do though is spin in a circle and shoot constantly. They have little shot costs and are autotrophs so they pretty much live forever. But that's basically cheating.
All a bot has to evolve is a way to peridoically store a value into .aimsx or aimdx to spin and into .shoot (or .backshoot) to shoot.  That this happens before it learns reproduce is a coin toss between those memory positions and .repro.  Note that half the possibile values that can be stored into .shoot are info shots, some of which can cuase reproduction in zerobots they hit.  Often the value bwing stored into .shoot is somethign like *.robage so the value is differetn each cycle.  This is a common way to see first replicators I.e. an info shot shooter causes replication in others.  The problem is the other half, the deadly shooters.  By not breeding autotrophs, the deadly shooters die out faster than the info shooters and your population doesn't get desimated...

Quote from: JossiRossi
EricL: For shepard bots or other ways to keep heterotrophs alive, what would you suggest for the beggining of a zerobot sim? Since they are essentially helpless for so incredibly long I want to make sure they have a chance to survive long enough to actually evolve.

I'll likely start of a new one as there's lots of good ideas for initial conditions that I think should be used.
Take a look here for info on shepard bots.  Let us know how it goes!
Many beers....

Offline Numsgil

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 7742
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #9 on: December 05, 2007, 12:36:57 PM »
Long term evo sims are always exciting.  Some of the first zerobot sims really surprised me when primitive viruses evolved.

Offline JossiRossi

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 31
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #10 on: December 05, 2007, 02:22:37 PM »
What I think I would like to do to feed my bots is what EricL suggested with having a bot spew out energy every so often. I'm definitely not bat adept right now. I copy/pasted out a shooting gene, and set it to shoot out energy to anything it hits. I didn't figure out rotation yet but I only worked on it for a little bit so I know I can figure that out but if you want to just tell me as I'm sure it's easy I won't mind.

My big issue is that the energy it spews out I think is proportional to what energy it has remaining. The closer it gets to 0 the smaller the shots are worth, and then when it finally does hit 0 energy it doesn't die. Instead it just shoots 0 energy shots. Not really sure why it does this, any ideas?

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #11 on: December 05, 2007, 02:26:52 PM »
You might want to take a look at the bleednrg bot here.

You should post the bot DNA if you want help debugging it.

EDIT:  Link corrected.
« Last Edit: December 05, 2007, 02:28:59 PM by EricL »
Many beers....

Offline JossiRossi

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 31
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #12 on: December 05, 2007, 02:35:04 PM »
Code: [Select]
start
-2 .shoot store
stop
end

I think I deserve "Best Bot Maker Ever Award".

Thus why it does not spin but I'll make an attempt on that tonight. As for not dying and shooting proportional (I assume) shots, that might be an environment setting I am missing, but I did make some attempts on the wiki and just looking at all the panels to find it. I set nrg shots to a 200 cost, instead of the default proportional but that didn't seem to work.

Also just checked the bleed NRG bot, it looks good. Probably about what I was on my way to making, just with less junk as I inevitably add stuff that would not be needed cause I'm messy.

Offline JossiRossi

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 31
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #13 on: December 06, 2007, 02:10:46 PM »
Alright, started up my new sim. I'm using the bleednrg bot (thanks EricL) to feed my bots. Unfortunately I tried with 500 bots and it slowed to a crawl was less than 10 frames a second and I imagine that would have only gotten worse as time went on so for now I'm using 250. I know zerobot sims require patience but I'm not quite ready for near real time evolution =p

Most settings are default, I removed DNA costs though to keep that from killing my bots off. The display area is nontoroidal. Also I added 2 blacklines in a "+" shape to seperate the area into 4 sections, the cutoff is not complete so each area can still access the others and the gaps are decently large. So off it goes.

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
200 Hour Zerobot Sim
« Reply #14 on: December 06, 2007, 02:23:37 PM »
Sounds good.  Good luck!

Note you may need to tweak the environment as things go along to add or modify selective pressures.  This in my book is not intelligent design as long as that tweaking does not play favorites in HOW evolution proceeds or otherwise "artificially" selects specific bots for survival or death.  So, tweaking the frequency of when bleednrg's come into the sim, their shot nrg or frequency, their number, whether they are fixed or not, the number of shapes, changing yoru shepards to hunters, etc.  is all fine IMHO.  Shepard bots are part of the environment (be sure they can't mutate and are virus immune).  But hand weeding out of evobots that don't do what you like or don't do it how you like is not IMHO if your goal is emergent complexity as opposed to artificial selection.  Just personal opinion.  Party on!
Many beers....