The State of the Simulation

[Testlund]

I have to say, I really don't like them. I don't think veggies should be running around in a chain and killing everything they find with shots and tie attacks.

That's why I only give my veggies 1 nrg/cycle and have day/night cycles set to 32000, and have vision turned off. The difference between an autotroph hunter and heterotroph hunter should be insignificant. The reason why veggies are the only ones that survives in my sim is because of costX that I need to use to prevent my sim to choke with bots. A hunter that can use it's energy a little more strategically, like shooting only when there's something to shoot at, and not constantly swims around aimlessly shouldn't have any problems surviving in my sim. On the contrary such a bot would most likely take over my sim completely.

[Peksa]

How would costs per species sound?

[Testlund]

How about an extra checkbox on the costs tab; include heterotrophs in costx? If just one of them is checked then increases/decreases in costX will only apply for the one checked.

[shvarz]

I wrote SV and SV2 to demonstrate exactly this - that veggies are too powerful.

Well, they are too powerful only under F1 conditions. Simple tweaks in costs and feeding take their advantages away. SV and SV2 were never able to get even slightly successful in my sim, because I feed veggies per kilobody point and have no limit on the number of veggies, only on total energy in the sim. SV2 just explodes into a hundred tiny bots that don't possess enough body to get energy for running and surviving the "night". So they die out. Simple as that.

[Trafalgar]

Wow, Spinner seems to have gone extinct.

[Numsgil]

I have a couple hundred sea snakes in my sim.  They all seem to be only two bots long.  Is that on purpose, or is it a mutation or something?

[EricL]

I have a couple hundred sea snakes in my sim.  They all seem to be only two bots long.  Is that on purpose, or is it a mutation or something?

They have mutated in a round about fashion.  Seasnake itself is marked not to mutate, but it shoots it's single gene as a virus, which can mutate in other host bots and in turn, get shot back into seasnake hosts.  As long as the DNA length stays at 1727, original seasnakes won't kill mutated versions.  There hasn't been much competition lately, so there's nothing to preserve the MB.  The snake genome is drifting.   Slowly but surely, evolution finds a way....

[gymsum]

I think I've found your Seasnake's advesary... Run the PLankton with point, copy and insetion mutations only and I find that the seasnake often fails to keep its dna preserved.

[shvarz]

For the last two days I've had no luck connecting to the IM server   Not a singe time....

[shvarz]

Now it's working!

But anyway, nothing fun comes in   I get tons of SeaSnakes from Eric, but they can't compete with my Alga minimalis, even when ALL costs are turned off.  This really sucks, as I'm seeing a lot of diversity in behavior evolving even within my own sim. It goes through stages, I had "sit next to shape and fire" bots, then "just run and shoot" bots, then "spin and shoot" bots, and now they seem to move toward "run in circles" bots. Remember circumgyrans? Or whatever they were called...  Well, I have this stuff evolved in my sim. See the attached pic.

[Numsgil]

heh, that's neat.

[shvarz]

And just to illustrate the level of diversity that I see, here's a pic of two more sub-species (notice the difference in color) that exist in the same sim at the same time with the stuff I posted above.  If only we had more coherent sims connected to each other...

[Numsgil]

I have about a half dozen computers I'm going to connect as soon as IM can be left unattended for weeks on end without breaking.

[asterixx]

Well, after about 850 hours, my zerobot sim collapsed, and I tried bringing it back to life but they kept going extinct; I think I can blame that on there being no family recognition, although the last bot alive wasn't the "bully/mass murderer" as I had expected so I dont know. I'm going to abandon that project for awhile and just try tinkering with internet mode: Is it functional?

[Numsgil]

It is, but may need to restart the program from time to time if the connection goes bad.