Veggies are too powerful

[shvarz]

Hey Eric, are you planning to do anything to deal with veggies getting their energy for free? Any ideas on long-term solutions or quick fixes?

Here's my thinking for a quick fix: Let's allow bots to become veggies through DNA commands. Keep the current system for now, but plan at some point in the future to turn off the program-defined veggie status.

But we need some kind of counter-balance for this "energy-for-free" state. I'm thinking something drastic, like at the end of DNA execution if a bot is scheduled to receive energy for free, then all other functions are suppressed in this cycle. No movement, no repro, no shots or ties. Just set all memlocs to zero.

[EricL]

I would very much like to do something about veggies - to institute some implicit cost to balance out the receipt of nrg for nothing.  Today, the only such cost is that of being restricted from reproducing when at the pop limits.

I have proposed several ideas akin to what you suggest (though not quite so severe) but people (including you) have consistently opposed any restrictions on veggy morphology.

The concept of putting veggieness under DNA control, perhaps via the manufacture of a substance is something I support and seems to be widely acceptable, but what the cost of this would be has not been well discussed.

Failing some broad consensus on this, I probably won't push it in the near term, having tried and failed to get consensus and having other things to work on, but if you want to champion change here, please do.

[Numsgil]

You can always implement "veggy-body", ie: chloroplasts or something similar.  It wouldn't power up shots like regular body does, or help other functions like that, but it would provide nrg based on the amount of chloroplasts you have.

The disadvantage would be the increase in volume (easier to hit) and mass (harder to move) without the corresponding increase in strength.

To maintain backwards compatibility, if a bot is marked as a "veggy", it means that commands that operate on body (like .fdbody and .strbody) operate on chloroplasts instead.

[shvarz]

Yes, I remember that discussion quite well. So let me point out the main difference between what you proposed then and my proposal here: The bots would not be permanently labeled as veggies and they will have no permanent handicap.

In my system they will only be handicapped for the cycle when they are receiving the energy. That is a bot can be a hunter when there are bots around it, but switch to veggie when food is rare. Veggies can sit and get energy for free, but when enemy appears they can drop the photosynthesis and start running.

I am open to imposing other handicaps associated with getting energy. I don't think my system is ideal in any way. But handicaps should be generic and allow bots to be "partially veggies".

I am against labeling a bot as a veggie once and for all and setting separate rules for it. All bots should be created equal!

[MacadamiaNuts]

I'd suggest manually lowering the energy input for veggies and raising the base costs so the sun input cannot offset the costs of fighting.

Even if only for a proof of concept, we can tweak our IM sims with a repop threshold over the max veggies so some dumb veggies are respawned often, then raising the base cost and lowering the sun input until the dumb veggies become more successful than Shrinking Violet.

(As a matter of fact, feeding from veggies like Shrinking Violet is possible, but it needs proper venom, chasing and targetting.)

[shvarz]

I'd suggest manually lowering the energy input for veggies and raising the base costs so the sun input cannot offset the costs of fighting.

How is that going to work? If a veggie with constant supply of energy does not have enough to run and hunt, how can a predator survive at such costs?

[MacadamiaNuts]

Yah, true, I was thinking about veggies that do not hunt other veggies.

[EricL]

In my system they will only be handicapped for the cycle when they are receiving the energy. That is a bot can be a hunter when there are bots around it, but switch to veggie when food is rare. Veggies can sit and get energy for free, but when enemy appears they can drop the photosynthesis and start running.

The problem I see with this on/off switch is that being able to instantly switch in and out of plant mode when food is scarce or when not being pursued or when your nrg is low, etc. is such a huge benifit that any hand authorred bot that does not do this will be at such a tremendous disadvantage that it will be obsolete and unable to compete.  Similarly, I worry that it will dramatically increase generation times and otherwise reduce competition in evo sims since runaway bots and other strategies can easily become imortal even int eh face of heavy costs.  There are other issues such as with population control (just switch out of veggie mode to reproduce then switch back).

IMHO, being a veggie should be a long term strategy decision and it should be rare that a DNA-line switches once a working strategy is hit upon.   While switching should be possible and under DNA control, it should not be possible to turn it on and off all at once like a light switch.   Rather, I would like to see it related to the production of some costly substance with some per cycle production limit where under typical sun conditions it takes many cycles to reclaim the nrg lost in making it.

Similarly, IMHO, there should be some on-going morphological cost proportional to the amount of the substance a bot is carrying (and thus proportional to the amount of free nrg it is receiving per cycle).  Num's veggy-body for instance.

Plant biologists will tell you that plant morphology and the defensive strategies that have evolved there from thorns to posion ivy to the ability to grow back after grazing are just as interesting as offensive animal preditor strategies.  I'll make the case again that placing morpholigcal restrictions on veggies may result in such interesting adaptations which we would not otherwise see.

Note that this still allows for hybrid organisms where different stages in the lifecylce of an organism use the different modes - e.g. the veggie that spawns hetertrophic mobile spores, the spore that becomes a fixed veggie only after being fertilized, etc.

[Peter]

Similarly, IMHO, there should be some on-going morphological cost proportional to the amount of the substance a bot is carrying (and thus proportional to the amount of free nrg it is receiving per cycle).  Num's veggy-body for instance.

Any thoughts on inplenting something like it, seems nice to have any bot start at desame conditions.

[EricL]

Any thoughts on inplenting something like it, seems nice to have any bot start at desame conditions.

Not sure what you are asking.  As above, I have many thoughts on this subject.

[MacadamiaNuts]

Here's an idea:

The veggie feeding bar now specifies the light intensity in %.
A new bar allows to specify how much free waste there is in the sim.
Pond mode puts more free waste in the lower side, opposite to the light intensity.

(nonzero) .getwaste -> gets the free waste as factor of body size.

Waste digestion turns a % of the total waste into energy each cycle: the % is specified by the light intensity. At 100% light intensity, a bot converts all the waste it gets into energy. Waste digestion works for all bots, since even predators can use small amounts of minerals.

At 50% intensity, and 1 point of waste per 10 body points, the A bot gets:

A: body 200
Turn 1: waste: 20, converted waste: 10
Turn 2: waste: 30, converted waste: 15
Turn 3: waste: 35, converted waste: 17.5
Turn 4: waste: 37.5, converted waste: 18.75

That means that, if the veggie allows waste to build up, it will maximize the energy. If it grows, it will get more waste and energy too, though maximizing the energy has an increased risk of bad waste effects.

Bots will choose then between sensible DNA that doesn't allow waste disruption but allows complex behaviour, and dumb DNA that can manage higher amounts of waste but it's too random to compete against the sleek hunters.

[shvarz]

The problem I see with this on/off switch is that being able to instantly switch in and out of plant mode when food is scarce or when not being pursued or when your nrg is low, etc. is such a huge benifit that any hand authorred bot that does not do this will be at such a tremendous disadvantage that it will be obsolete and unable to compete.

It's possible to balance things out. Turn off the eyes for photsynthesizing bot and it becomes a sitting duck ready to be picked up by any predator.  But I'm not dead-set on this idea, I see the disadvantages.

I really thing it should be possible for a bot to be half-plant half-hunter, with a smooth gradient of handicap. Nums' veggie-body idea is reasonable, although I don't know whether it will handicap veggies enough. Turning off ability to shoot or tie does not seem fair.

Also, consider this: we can actually make it work without any handicaps to the veggies. Here's how: hunting has a built-in gradient of efficiency. One can be a poor hunter or a great hunter depending on the complexity and efficiency of DNA code. Being a veggie needs a similar built-in gradient. Just a switch between veggie and non-veggie is not enough. It should be possible to be a poor photosynthesizer and a great one, and it should be controllable from DNA. Being a good veggie should require a set of complex genes. If a bot does not use these genes, they will mutate and make it a poor veggie, thus giving a way for speciation.

[EricL]

So, to paraprhase, your saying the human configures the environment to contain some amount of waste floating around, perhaps distributed as a gradient in pond mode (or in a more complex fashion via the Egrid) and that bots (via a new .getwaste sysvar) can extract this waste (up to some human defined amount per cycle and according to their body size) and store it within themselves.   We make waste the substance that determines how much free nrg a bot receives per cycle.   How much waste a bot is carrying determines how much free nrg it receives per cycle.  The more waste a bot has, the more nrg it receives but by not getting rid of waste, it runs the risk of triggering the altzheimers routine and having it's memory messed up.

Hmmm.   The implied tradoff inherent in risking altzheimers is interesting, but in the end I don't like it because I don't want to limit bots to making the choice between being a smart animal or a stupid plant.  I want bots to be able to be smart plants with very complex DNA that does lots of interesting things in precise ways replying on unmessed up memory.  I want thorns and poison and such.  I just think we should limit what things (or the magnitude of which) plants can do propotional to how much free nrg it receives.

So, I still favor a new substance bots must manufacture to absorb nrg which has morphological implications(explicit or consequencal) proportional to its amount.