Sysvar Question

[Endy]

Alright, this has been bugging me for the last few days. One of my bots mutated their repro dna:

.repro 32000 rnd mult inc

by adding a >> (right bit shift) before the inc.

there's nothing before the .repro command, so it is basically functioning as a 2 div.

The question is what's so useful about it that it's been conserved across the whole species for the last few days. I've looked at all the multiples of 150 and only 300, 450 and 900 look they actually do something.

[EricL]

Perhaps reproducing only half as often as before is advantageous given your environment.

Or perhaps it is neutral and fixated through drift.  Your population is probably totally asexual, which means all the bots are VERY closely related (you may want to look at the subspecies diversity graph) and likly share a reletively recent common ancestor, like only a few dozen generations back or fewer.  DNA fixates in the population not through recombination and competition between alleles but through direct descendency.  Perhaps the ancestor where it occurred was just in the right place at the right time or had the most nrg or whatever to be lucky enough to be the grand daddy of his entire race and the mutation just went along for the ride...  

[Endy]

I actually thought something similar, but in tests a bot with the command did better each time, than an otherwise identical bot without it. The rate of reproduction is the same, although it's reproducing whenever 32000 rnd is equal to 2 instead of 1. I'll probably just end up testing the sysvars individually and seeing if one of them has a noticable effect.

[EricL]

The actual rate of reproduction is probably limited by body.   It could be that your bots are now backshooting info shots half as often...

[Endy]

I think you're right. I added some code to prevent backshooting and noticed a big improvement.