The State of the Simulation

[Numsgil]

I remember that bug.  Ugh.

[Trooper5445]

Ah the simulation is interesting. Bloody seasnake. Who created that monstrosity? Anyhow my bot is doing rather well. About as well as spinner. Of course every time L_Sesillia gets ready to increase in pop the snake kills too many of my bots. Oh well its an existence.

How does it look? All I have is a population graph to guess at. I'm going to switch L_Sesilli to Purple as well for easier recognition.

[EricL]

Seasnake 1.2 finally managed to colonize EricL2 and wipe out Spinner 1.3.  Not bad for a multibot...

Respect the snake.

[shvarz]

Ever since I got those weird "Alga Minimalis infected with Seasnake genome" veggies, I had only them. They did not necessarily wipe out the rest of the bots, but they just outcompeted for energy my original "alga shellular" and "Duplo" died out because it was adapted to eating "Alga shellular".  These weird veggies are mutating like crazy, which might suggest that either a) they don't need most of the functions in their genome for survival or B) they are adapting to the new environment. They also learned to extract energy from nowhere grew to huge numbers in my sim, but after Eric fixed the waste bug, they are back at ~600 individuals.

Stuff keeps coming in from other people, but nothing survives for long.

[shvarz]

I was looking at the "infected Alga minimalis" and noticed a specific phenotype - they group into twos, come on top of one another and stay that way turning around and around, constantly shooting stuff at each other (I think it's waste). See attached picture.  

I am curious - is this a normal behavior for veggies infected with Seasnake DNA?  Or did it develop specifically in my sim?  Anyone else see this happening?

BTW, Nanite Detonators seem to be doing OK in my sim, they are not growing fast, but at least they are not dying...  They are managing to get by...

[Trafalgar]

BTW, Nanite Detonators seem to be doing OK in my sim, they are not growing fast, but at least they are not dying...  They are managing to get by...

My 2.2 version wipes out everything I put it against in my sim, but as far as I can tell from the internet population thing, they aren't doing well anywhere else.

I even started a sim up with nothing but seasnake 1.2 and algae minimalis, waited until the seasnakes were dominant and swimming around with 6 or so bots per snake, and then introduced a few nanite detonators, which proceeded to spread and eventually take over the sim (There are about 67 seasnake bots left, in the upper-left and lower-left corner of the sim. There were 80-something the last time the graph updated before that).

What conditions are y'all using in your sims? (I'm using standard F1 conditions, I think)

Edit: Though after they reach 1000 bots of the same species in the sim, they mostly just sit there and do nothing. (Putting most of their energy into body)

[Numsgil]

shvarz uses some tweaked cost values.  I think it's just cost for body, IIRC.

[EricL]

Both EricL and EricL2 are running pretty standard physics with a few visible shapes.  Bots that arn't shape aware tend to bash themselves to death.

Neither sim has sunlight.  Veggy repop is the only source of nrg.  This keeps the seasnake genome and other virus infected veggies from taking over.  Also limits the utlitiy of battery bots.

The only cost is an age cost but auto-costs tend to keep it high, like 1-2 nrg per cycle.  Seasnakes are good in high cost environments since they store a lot of nrg in body and rachet this down over time.  When a snake dies from running out of nrg, the whole snake dies all at once.  The cells share nrg until then.

Nanites show up and get to maybe 100 or so, but the high cost environment tends to keep their numbers down.  High age costs work against cancerous and semi-cancerous bots.   They favor more robust, higher nrg, higher body macro organisms.  The more bots you use to spread your nrg around, the faster the costs deplete it....

[Testlund]

Seasnakes are good in high cost environments...

Not in my sim.    Everything that comes in dies quickly except for Alga Minimalis that now slowly increase my population. I'm running with morphological costs only. No upkeep or ageing costs. Costx has been staying at 26.83383 fro the last days.

[EricL]

Not in my sim.    Everything that comes in dies quickly except for Alga Minimalis that now slowly increase my population. I'm running with morphological costs only.

Well, sure.  If all you want is pond scum, using morphological costs is a fine way to select against complexity.

[Testlund]

You all seem to run combat bots designed to work without costs while I run evobots, so it's quite different.
But logically complexity should be able to evolve with morphological costs. It's just that the bots need to do it in the right order. After all, swimming and running isn't free in the real world. Anything living need a way to gain energy for it. All it should take here is a bot to be able to fire a tie and do tie feeding to get the extra energy to move around more, or shoot -1 shots when it bumps into a bot. For some reason info shots are more common than feeding shots. What choses to come out of mutations are maybe not random. Never seen a zerobot evolve tie feeding for instance, though I have had a whole network of zerobots tied together in my sim last year.
I'm hoping though that complex behavior will evolve from very simple in as natural environment as possible.
Also my kind of bots have to have costs otherwise they'll freeze my sim with too many bots.

[Trafalgar]

Both EricL and EricL2 are running pretty standard physics with a few visible shapes.  Bots that arn't shape aware tend to bash themselves to death.

How DO you get shape-aware bots, anyhow? I've spawned some random shapes, and as far as I can tell, the bots can run right into them and still not see them - reftype is 0 still and the vision distance isn't appearing shorter like it does when it sees a bot.

Though as far as I can tell, running into the shapes isn't doing any damage either.

[EricL]

I need some new shape UI.  For now, checking the Bots Can See Shapes checkbox on the New Shape UI will make all shapes visible.

[Testlund]

Too many Alga Minimalis have started to fill my sim, so I decided to set costs back to 0 and added ageing costs. Maybe some of your bots will come in and eat the algas before population reaches 3200 where costX will start to increase.  

[Moonfisher]

Heh I saw spinner v1.3 was down to 1 bot, and then fought it's way back up to 30 bots.
It's the first bot I've had any success with on IM, so figured I'd try to see if those teleporters where working for me so I could send some reinforcements.
And it seem like I have no problems sending and recieving bots in version k.
So started 2 sim with a veggy population of 2 and spinner v1.5.

Right now I have somewhere around 500-600 bots in my 2 sims, and theres about 2500 spinners out there, and seasnake is down to about 300 (It was almost at 3000 when I started the sims)
It took about 20000 cycles  
Finaly got to successfully spread something on IM !