Author Topic: Make New Species menu item  (Read 4776 times)

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
Make New Species menu item
« on: December 01, 2007, 05:09:32 PM »
This new menu item on the robots menu (new in 2.43u) creates a new species starting from the bot with the focus.  Separate series will show up for this bot and all it's decendents in graphs and such and they can be tracked as s separate species both locally and in internet mode.

Unlike the Save DNA feature which allows you to rename a specific bot (but does not change it's species) this menu item creates an actual new species structure for the bot and all it's descendants.  This means that sysvars like .totalmyspecies will work correctly and reflect the population of only this bot and it's descendants.

The name for the new bot is programatcially chosen at present as the first 10 characters of the focus bot's name with a random 4 digit number appended.  Down the road I will likely add species renaming, but for now you are stuck with this name for the new bot.

A handy trick is to simply choose the Best Bot and then choose Make New Species.

A forthcoming feature will allow for automatic speceis forking of a set of related bots, not just a single bot, based upon human settable subspecies distance.
Many beers....

Offline shvarz

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 1341
    • View Profile
Make New Species menu item
« Reply #1 on: December 01, 2007, 06:36:47 PM »
Awesome!!!
 
"Never underestimate the power of stupid things in big numbers" - Serious Sam

Offline Numsgil

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 7742
    • View Profile
Make New Species menu item
« Reply #2 on: December 01, 2007, 07:11:51 PM »
Nice.  Would be nice to set the best bot and all its descendants as the new species

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
Make New Species menu item
« Reply #3 on: December 01, 2007, 08:40:29 PM »
Quote from: Numsgil
Nice.  Would be nice to set the best bot and all its descendants as the new species
Agreed.  Crawl, walk, run.
Many beers....

Offline Numsgil

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 7742
    • View Profile
Make New Species menu item
« Reply #4 on: December 01, 2007, 09:29:15 PM »
...not necessarily in that order

Offline fulizer

  • Bot Destroyer
  • ***
  • Posts: 198
    • View Profile
Make New Species menu item
« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2007, 09:06:40 AM »
the shufling comes first
"If this is coffee bring me tea, If this is tea, bring me coffee"

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
Make New Species menu item
« Reply #6 on: December 04, 2007, 01:05:59 PM »
FYI, in 2.43v, this feature iterates recursivly through all extant descendants of the selected bot, changing their species as well.  

In addition, it changes all bots (be they descendants or not) with a subspecies distance of 0 or 1 from the selected bot.

Note that it is still possible some extant descendants of the seleted bot will be missed.  This will happen in the case where both of the following are true

1) The chain of descent to a descendent runs thorugh a bot that is no longer living at the time Make New Species is executed.  The current data structures do not currently preserve descendency information between extant bots if that descendency runs through 1 or more dead individuals.
2) That descendent has a subspecies distance greater than 1 from the selected bot, meaning that two or more mutations (or virus infections) have occurred in the line of descent between this bot and the selected bot.
« Last Edit: December 04, 2007, 01:33:36 PM by EricL »
Many beers....