Author Topic: 200 Hour Zerobot Sim  (Read 11169 times)

Offline MacadamiaNuts

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« Reply #15 on: December 06, 2007, 05:01:30 PM »
Last time I checked, negative costs will feed your heterotroph exnihils until they are good enough to feed by themselves (this is usually once they can move and shoot constantly and reproduce sometimes).

You can even prize them for moving, shooting or tieing.
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Offline JossiRossi

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« Reply #16 on: December 09, 2007, 02:41:57 PM »
After 50 hours and 8,300,000 cycles I had my first babies. Two bouncing baby dots. Well not so much bouncing as sitting there slowly spinning.

So far I haven't gotten any spinny death bots, I believe this is more a matter of luck than anything else as no bots have killed themselves shooting off all their energy. I looked at the dna of the parent and it's children and the differences are pretty great. I'm not sure if perhaps the children were born a long time ago and just had a lot of point mutations or if it's something else going on. Also looking at the dna I can't seem to see HOW it reproduced as there's no reproduction code in them so perhaps that mutated out too.

One thing I have noticed is that I don't seem to have evolved any active movers yet, still waiting on that. Also nothing shoots even a little I don't believe. That comes to a good question though. What's the best way to figure out what your bots are doing? When you have hundreds of bots all spinning and drifting how can you tell whats brownian movement and what's active actions?
« Last Edit: December 09, 2007, 02:47:15 PM by JossiRossi »

Offline JossiRossi

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« Reply #17 on: December 12, 2007, 03:43:46 AM »
After 100 hours I still have not had any extinction level events. So score. Right now I've gotten the occasional reproduction event. But nothing that's been really repetitive, nothing is really bursting outward just yet. However at about 85 hours I did have a huge spike of 45 births. I have no idea what happened other than only 1 seems to have survived out of the 45 and that might be coincidental. My theory is that something reproduced and might have repeatedly split itself up until they all died but I don't know how likely that is. Regardless 45 bots were born (and I think they died off as the population level remained static almost and it wasn't that they killed an equal number of bots) and then 44 of those 45 died. So essentially all of them. After this I upped the frequency of the bleedbot being planted in a little to give newcomers better chances to get some energy and stick around, cause if they have any costs they are in a REAL hostile environment, need to baby them a little bit.

Offline JossiRossi

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« Reply #18 on: December 19, 2007, 01:40:48 AM »
Stats
200 Hours
46 births (no change from around 100 hours)
211 bots (down about 5 from when the population burst killed some bots off)
30,000,000 cycles

So until this mark things had been pretty static. It didn't seem like there was much moving forward. However just as I am about to reach the 200 hour mark I check and there's been a DRASTIC EXCITING CHANGE.

Well compared to the last 100 hours it is anyway. My zerobots had at first a DNA length of 31. I meant to make the bot only have 30 but I must have added one extra 0 by mistake. Now after 200 hours the average length is 31.6. I'm now finding bots with DNA lengths twice as long as the rest, and oddly enough some with DNA lengths that have shrunk.

I believe I recall in a discussion that one factor of DNA growth is virus shots, so perhaps I got a bot somewhere doing that. But regardless hopefully this will show a steady climb in activity.

Currently I have no costs associated to the bots (save for shots so they don't MURDER everyone else) should I start those up even though NRG aquisition is random? Or should I wait until they have some kind of targetting system down? I just don't personally have experience in putting pressure onto the ecology without simply wiping everything out, especially the very bots I wish to keep going on.

Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #19 on: December 19, 2007, 01:43:28 AM »
Generally I'd advise only adding costs in response to your bots breeding too fast.  That is, only add costs if your sim is running too slow and you want to cull some bots.  I don't think you're quite that far yet

Offline JossiRossi

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« Reply #20 on: December 19, 2007, 01:49:41 AM »
Quote from: Numsgil
Generally I'd advise only adding costs in response to your bots breeding too fast.  That is, only add costs if your sim is running too slow and you want to cull some bots.  I don't think you're quite that far yet

You coddle your bots too much. Tsk, tsk. People like you are the cause of the rise in bot crime!
(And yeah I'm definitely not at that point yet. Maybe in another few hundred hours =])

Also here's a screenshot. More than anything it's for my set up which could result in some interesting things later on.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v202/Jos.../darwinbots.jpg

As the hours go by on average 3 boxes will be well populated while the last will only have a few bots in it often only in the corners. I don't know if this is a result of the slight Brownian movement or not but it's nice to have these quasi compartments I think.

Offline fulizer

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« Reply #21 on: December 19, 2007, 06:14:35 AM »
The best time to up costs is when the bots are doing some active hunting that should prevent them from turning into "run around in circles shooting constantly" bots
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Offline bacillus

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« Reply #22 on: April 14, 2008, 01:33:27 AM »
The last time I ran a 0bot simulation, I had similar problems with the reproduction thing. What I did was give the bots a ridiculously large amount of energy every cycle, so reproductive bots could evolve without immediately being blasted out of existence. This worked until bots kept evolving that pumped up their shots to a ridiculous power and undermined the whole ecosystem. I tried the feeding veggies thing, but that didn't adress the problem of no conspec being evolved. Does anyone have any other ideas?
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Offline EricL

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« Reply #23 on: April 14, 2008, 11:02:42 AM »
Quote from: bacillus
Does anyone have any other ideas?
I prefer to use veggy shepard bots.  Early in a zerobot sim, they are more than benign - they are generous.  They shoot nrg shots at the evolving bots, targettig them directly.  They can scale this back over time, shoot with less precision, switch to random nrg shots, scale back the number of shots per unit time, move occasionally, etc. as the population grows or vice versa if it drops.  Over time, they can become less generous, stop shooting, etc.  At the extreme, they become preditors.

I prefer this method over simply evolving zerobots as veggies as it provides pressure to evolve.  Bots cannot adapt to free nrg from heaven.  There is nothing they can do to improve their nrg aquisition, it is outside evolution.  By using physical nrg shots from physcial bots, evolution can adapt and select for better nrg aquisition strategies.   A zerobot that simply moves continiously through a field of random nrg shooters has an advantage over those that are fixed and so on.
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Offline Testlund

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« Reply #24 on: April 14, 2008, 12:57:12 PM »
Well, I'm not so sure. You have a point that when recieving free energy the bot doesn't need to do anything, still I've seen them do lots of stuff than just sitting fixed on the background. Last time I started out with veggies and then separated them into heterotrophs and autotrophs, ran them in two instances connected with teleporters. The heterotrophs I ran with energy providers to feed them. I found the heterotrophs evolved to do even less then the autotrophs, totally energy conservative. Also they became more hardy against costs, and eventually slowly started to take over the autotroph sim, just waiting for the autotrophs to die of too high costs at night.
This time around I started with both heterotrophs and autotrophs in the same sim, only giving the autotrophs 1 energy per cycles, plus the night lasts for 32000 cycles. That means autotrophs can't afford to do much if they want to live, or they need to evolve better feeding strategy. All it takes here is a bot that evolves tie feeding or shooting in close proximity of other bots to get that extra energy, and it should be able to survive and reproduce better.
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Offline EricL

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« Reply #25 on: April 14, 2008, 05:52:43 PM »
Evolution requires differential survival tied to genetics.  That is, there must be some implicit or explicit competition between individuals and genotypes which relates to reproductive fitness.

I suggest one such battle front - that of aquiring nrg.  Bots that are better at aquiring nrg then others are fitter, which should lead to higher reproductive fitness.   There are other battle fronts.  I'm not saying that bots given free nrg will do nothing or fail to evolve.  One can imagine them competing in other ways, say through metabolic effeciency in the face of costs.  But personally, I prefer sims which select for increased complexity not increased simplicity.   This is why I prefer not to have any costs at all in my evo sims these days and use shepards/preditors instead for applying selective pressure.
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Offline bacillus

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« Reply #26 on: April 15, 2008, 12:48:39 AM »
The problem lies not with food acquisition but with successful reproduction. A bot would have to evolve conspec first.
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Offline EricL

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« Reply #27 on: April 15, 2008, 01:00:53 AM »
Quote from: bacillus
A bot would have to evolve conspec first.
What exactly do you mean by this?  Conspec recognition - indeed our whole concept of species - is artifical and means little in an asexually reproducing evosim population...  Replication, yes of course and that is the main battle front and main determinant of fitness in all zerobot sims I know of.  I.e. out replicating others.  Replcaition is fairly easy to evolve, it happens in most zero bot sims after a few million cycles and invaribly is ultimatly limited by the body limit which is where nrg aquisition becomes the key element of compitition.

But conspec recognition?  What does that even mean in an evo sim?
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Offline Numsgil

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« Reply #28 on: April 15, 2008, 02:38:32 AM »
Maybe he means not eating your own the same cycle you reproduced?
« Last Edit: April 15, 2008, 02:38:57 AM by Numsgil »

Offline EricL

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« Reply #29 on: April 15, 2008, 09:40:23 AM »
Quote from: Numsgil
Maybe he means not eating your own the same cycle you reproduced?
You just don't see prediation of any form in zerobot sims.   Eating another bot, be it your offspring or any other is a sophisticated act, one that requires conditional logic or at least a combination of mutliple coordinated actions.  We havn't seen it evolve yet.   It's just too sophisticated.  Hopefully some day.
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