Evo sims are much easier to run than a while ago becouse of the great performance increases.
I've got an evosim with 2,9M cycles. The bot's started as Animal Minimalis modified to sexually reproduce without conditions and move randomly. Veggies used to be C. Circumgirans with shooting gene removed and body management added, but I've edited them since. At the moment they randomly use 3 different kinds of poison, turn away from shooting and move almost straight forward. It's a largish (size 12), non-toroidal map with some shapes in one corner. The only costs are ageing costs that increase very slowly after 10 kc and high body costs, 16 nrg/c/kBodypoint. With 1000 cycle days and nights, the costs take heavy toll on veggies, but they manage and would survive overnight if bots would let them. Also, I've altered mutation rates to slightly favor DNA insertion rather than clearly favor deletion. To top it off, I set mutations at 0.25. Oh, and there's slowly decaying corpses in there too.
It's suprising how well they adapt and how little they break. Of course, at start mutations broke down everything that wasn't necessary, but a bit suprisingly maintained basicly the same behaviour. Whole population learned to not to shoot shapes in matter of tens of thousands of cycles and actually stayed at certain distance from them after a couple hundred thousand cycles. The latter broke down though after introducing harder-to-eat-and-poison-using veggies that mess with bots' conspec recoginition. Bots seem to hunt in "packs". When a veggie pops in, bots chase it or the bot's chasing it (any moving bots really) and when the veggie turns and tries to lose the bots, some of the bots usually catch a sight of it and start chasing it and other bots start chasing the chaser or chaser of chaser etc.
All this comes from simply optimizing simple DNA and changing a BP here and another there. Average mutations are at 200 at the moment. There's half a dozen stores that are really hard to decipher, but I'm fairly certain that they don't do anything. Because of the sexual reproduction and low mutation rates, I've actually seen average mutations get lower with time a few times.
Another thing I've noticed is that species diversity to population rate is constantly around 0.4, when in sims with asexual reproduction it is much lower, 0.3 or 0.2. That's not really that suprising, but it's still nice to see that .sexrepro makes a real difference.
As I've lost hope to have a stable veggie-bot cycle with co-evolution in this sim, I'm concentrating on giving bots more diversified enviroment. I'll make veggies tougher and repop them more rarely and give them different behaviours to choose from, decrease corpse decay rate, maybe add some more shapes and anything else I can think of.
