Author Topic: Hiya and wiki  (Read 7241 times)

Offline Junior

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Hiya and wiki
« on: March 31, 2008, 01:40:15 PM »
Just found this game and thought I should say hello.

BTW, a lot of the wikipages take ages to load and a lot of them don't load at all. Kind of puts an end to all learning. Is it just my connection that's bad or aren't the pages there or what is it?

Offline Testlund

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2008, 02:51:16 PM »
Quote from: Junior
...game...

Hmmm. I suppose I would call it that too if I only played with the leages, but I don't. I Only run evosims, so for me it's an a-life research program.  

Quote
BTW, a lot of the wikipages take ages to load and a lot of them don't load at all. Kind of puts an end to all learning. Is it just my connection that's bad or aren't the pages there or what is it?

Happens to me too.

Anyway, welcome to the cozy DB community!  
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Offline shvarz

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #2 on: March 31, 2008, 02:56:34 PM »
Welcome, Junior!
Wiki is slow for me too   Just ask your questions here and we'll try to answer them the best we can
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Offline Numsgil

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2008, 05:29:50 PM »
I know the wiki's slow.  I'm going to try and put aside some time in the next few days and figure out why.

Offline asterixx

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #4 on: March 31, 2008, 06:49:27 PM »
Yeah, the pages tend to be slow. But that certainly isn't the end of all learning. I can't say that I'll be overly helpful but their are a lot of friendly, helpful people on these forums who have a lot of experience with DB, three of whom have posted above me   .

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Offline Commander Keen

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #5 on: March 31, 2008, 07:56:54 PM »
I've never had any problems with wiki speed, but I'm on dialup, so maybe I'm just rather patient  

Offline Junior

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #6 on: April 01, 2008, 01:14:43 AM »
Wow, thanks for the massive and immediate response.

Well, I got as far as to tie feeding but I can't seem to open the wiki tutorial on MBs. Anyone got another way to get a hold of it?

PS. And why do some bots explode into lots of small attached uh... bits?
« Last Edit: April 01, 2008, 01:24:22 AM by Junior »

Offline Numsgil

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #7 on: April 01, 2008, 01:21:12 AM »
When you can't load a page, wait like 3 minutes and try again.  Make sure you clear your cache (not sure if it matters, but it can't hurt.  It's either shift F5 or ctrl F5).  What seems to be wrong is someone (yahoo maybe?) is doing a huge query that slows the whole thing down.  The query eventually will end, and you should be able to load a page successfully.  It's not related to what page you try to load.

Offline fulizer

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #8 on: April 01, 2008, 08:58:45 AM »
Quote from: Junior
And why do some bots explode into lots of small attached uh... bits?
this happens due to mutation in the bots reproductive organ (normally)
when this happens it will remove the limit that causes the bot to reproduce woth enough enrgy meaning that it activates every cycle causing it to reproduce into hundreds of smaller children due to body sharing during reproduction.
this is called a cancorus bot.
normally they tend to die though
also (before someone corrects me) it also happens when a bot dies it lets of a series of shots which dont normally do anything but can include energy (I think)
« Last Edit: April 02, 2008, 08:36:39 AM by fulizer »
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Offline Junior

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #9 on: April 01, 2008, 11:12:07 AM »
Oh, they do, but it takes some time and slows down the entire simulation until they're dead. Can I do something to stop this from happening or make them die as soon as it does?
« Last Edit: April 01, 2008, 11:19:20 AM by Junior »

Offline EricL

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #10 on: April 01, 2008, 11:38:04 AM »
Quote from: Junior
Oh, they do, but it takes some time and slows down the entire simulation until they're dead. Can I do something to stop this from happening or make them die as soon as it does?
Don't start from hand-authorred bots.  Start from a population of zero bots or at a minumum, a hand-authorred bot that is already cancerous.  

Cancerous bots (bots that attempt to reproduce every cycle) are the norm in all long running evo sims but you usually only notice them early in an evo sim that begins with an artifical starting point I.e. hand authorred bots instead of zerobots.  Hand authorred bots with hand-authorred conditional reproduction genes represent a lot of artifically stored nrg (body actually, since that is the key resource necessary for reproduction) that can suddenly be released by a mutation like a damn bursting and trigger a flurry of explosive reproduction.  Like a damn, this hand-authorred code is totally artificial and ineffecient from selection's perspective.   Not reproducing when you could gets selected against eventually.   Naturally evolved bots will not store nrg needlessly waiting to reproduce.  They will reproduce whenever they can (whenever they aquire enough body that the simulator allows them to).

Given the right environmental conditions such as preditor - prey co-evolution, we might eventually see selection favor larger bodies at the expense of more frequent reproduction.  One can imagine conditions where having larger offspring is critical to survival and thus the storing of nrg (as well as the conversion of nrg into body) before reproducing might be heavily selected for in such conditions but that hasn't been seen yet, at least not outside of internet mode.  It is possible the competition between different species in IM demands larger bots with more nrg reserved from combat and thus serves to provide enough selection pressure to preserve conditional reproduction logic, but this is largly conjecture on my part at this point.  To my knowledge, we have yet to see a bot evolved from a zerobot ancestor develop any sort of conditional reproduction logic.  (Doing so would qualify for winning the Conditional Logic Prize.)

If you want to stick with a hand-authorred starting point, you can use autocosts to jack CostX up when population spikes occur to keep it under control.  You might also try the latest drop 2.43.1f.  It's a lot faster for larger, sparser sims, but the benifits will be limited when you get dense clusters of cancerous growth.  It will help, but you will still see the slowdown when bots reproduce explosivly.  Eventually your hand authorred bots will all devolve and 10 million cycles down the road, your sim will be full of tiny bots that try to reproduce every cycle no matter where you start from.  They will all be cancerous, but with no artifically stored reserve to exploit.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2008, 12:19:24 PM by EricL »
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Offline Moonfisher

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #11 on: April 12, 2008, 04:24:44 AM »
Doesn't that depend on the sim ? If it's a not a veggy and it devolves to break it's repro gene it'll become too small to gather energy from shots and ties won't it ? So eventualy anything with a broken repro gene should die out if it's not an alge...
Either way I had the same problem, and I had huge bots, so when one of them mutated it could spawn lik 5000 litle bots...
And since I'm very impatient I used the following gene :

cond
*.body 20 <
*.robage 0 >
start
0 .repro store
-2 shoot store
31999 .shootval store
stop

This should clear out those growths rather fast, so they don't slow down the sim for too long...

Offline Testlund

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #12 on: April 12, 2008, 11:11:11 AM »
Quote from: EricL
Naturally evolved bots will not store nrg needlessly waiting to reproduce.  They will reproduce whenever they can (whenever they aquire enough body that the simulator allows them to).

I find this fascinating. The program has something to teach us here. For instance, when programming bots everyone uses '.repro', but in an evosim the program choses 'inc' instead. When I ran my long evosim last year, more than half a year around the clock, I don't think I ever saw .repro in the dna. The program kind of shows us what it has been designed for. I'm thinking here that in the computer world there is no such thing as absolut randomness. I'm thinking that a program makes choices even though it has been designed to be random.
When I found that I couldn't load my saves because they got corrupted, I started over by loading a sim from when I first started this sim, which contained bots wirth only zeros in it. After between 100000-200000 cycles I got reproduction going just like last time. I also discovered a bot that had the same position and offspring with the same colors after this time, as when I ran it the first time. So the mutations must have occured exactly the same as the first time. First I thought that DB must bee seeded instead of random, but that doesn't make sense either. Here's a screenshot of the bot with it's offspring:
« Last Edit: April 12, 2008, 11:13:03 AM by Testlund »
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Offline EricL

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #13 on: April 12, 2008, 12:39:56 PM »
Quote from: Testlund
First I thought that DB must bee seeded instead of random...
If you started from a saved sim as opposed to beginning a brand new sim, then the seed is the same and the sim should play out the same subject to version differences and external influences beyond the local simulator's control such as internet mode and teleporters.
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Offline Testlund

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Hiya and wiki
« Reply #14 on: April 13, 2008, 03:42:50 AM »
You mean the mutations are pre-set when to occure from the beginning and in what order? What if I run a sim for several years, or forever? I don't see how it could be possible for the program to calculate that much mutations before starting the sim, or maybe the mutations goes through a limited list and then start from the beginning, making the same mutations repeat themselves. These bots got the same colors and chosed to reproduce and place themselves exactly like the first time.
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