Bots and Simulations > Simulation Emporium

Ways to increase natural selection?

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Peksa:
Average fitness of species depends on two factors. Mutations mostly reduce fitness by breaking and mutation DNA and natural selection increases fitness, favoring those whose genomes survive better. In basic DB sim the enviroment isn't very complicated and doesn't encourage very complicated behaviour. What I'm hoping for is some simple or not-so-simple ways to encourage evolution of more interesting bots.

Off the top of my head, I can think of enabling corpse mode with low enough decay rate, adding some shapes that bots can see, running non-toroidal sim or running a sim in internet mode. Of course, creating a stable ecosystem with two or more species co-evolving would be the ultimate goal, but that's a tad hard to archieve.

Numsgil:
I have managed to get Animal Minimalis and Enitor Comesum co-evolving in an evo sim.  The alga was being fed per veggy instead of per kilobody (this was before I added the per kilobody option), so it evolved to be cancerous.  The enitor comesum just couldn't eat the veggies faster than they could reproduce.  Each veggy tended to have very little nrg, usually around 2 or 3, so the bots had a really hard time gathering enough nrg to stay alive.

Ultimately the sim died when the alga evolved a vibrating wiggle that made it difficult for the enitor comesum to keep the veggies visible.  The population for the enitors dropped to a few dozen, which wasn't enough to prevent deadend mutations and I gave up the sim.

Moral of the story is that you can get co-evolution, but you have to be willing to start with something that is evolutionarily stable.  Cancerous veggies and cannibots aren't very aesthetically pleasing, but they play well together in an evo sim, if you can afford to have 10x the number of veggies as animals.

Moonfisher:
Another way of favoring natural selecting is having a low amount of food, saw someone has evolved a very interesting bot behavior this way, can't remember wich topic.
Anyway I tryed running a similar sim, using the newest neural network base I managed to put together (Thanks to a lot of sugestions).
It only uses point mutations, and not too often, oscilating between 16 and 1/16 mutations. (Only spending a short time with 16* mutations)
I've slowly reduced the mutations and food over time.
It's a size 13 field and it has a veggy repop of 25 with 1 veggi spawning and a lower max veggy... basicaly there's always 25 veggies...
I have normal F1 costs, but I had to reduce the movement costs to next to nothing, also cut the code execution costs and set age costs to set in at 5000 cyles and increase slowly.
Everything else is standard F1 settings...
It seems like the bots have evolved a very starnge behavior when eating an alge, it spends most of the time firing in any other direction than the alge, and only feeds on the alge when it has a different speed (So if another bot is trying to "steal" the alge it tryes to kill it).
The alge doesn't last forever this way, but it does manage to get a lot more energy from the alge than if it has just eaten it right away.
It also uses reproduction as a defence mechanism... whenever it's in pain or getting shot or something (Not sure exactly whats going on) it starts to spawn several new offspring.
It also seems like some of them make a very large child if they're getting realy big while eating an alge, leaving the small parent to start over on the alge while the large child takes off... I'm guessing this makes the alge last longer as the shots from a smaller bot are weaker...
And it actualy managed to evolve balanced shell, as I had hoped. It looks like it's triggered by getting shot, it does sometimes end up eating some of the shell... but it looks like it only happens outside of combat...

The point is that the low food favors clever bots, so it promotes more interesting behaviors...
I was running a simpler version of the network (Only 4 outputs) earlyer in a sim with plenty of food, it didn't take long for almost everything to break, it was suddenly going in one dirrection at all times, traveling at max speed and shooting constantly... Oddly enough this worked very well because of the abundance of food and worked as a sort of conspec since the bots never ran into eachother...
It basicaly just formed larger waves of bots traveling side by side.
So having too much food can promote a very simple behavior...
And I would imagine a lot of the other setting you mentioned won't have a nearly as noticable effect if the food is abundant...

Endy:

--- Quote ---Cancerous veggies and cannibots aren't very aesthetically pleasing, but they play well together in an evo sim, if you can afford to have 10x the number of veggies as animals.
--- End quote ---

Had an evobot that actually regained their conspec recognition to a degree. Had to become a full canni to get there though... I think that randomly shooting a fellow member is okay in the bot's world, but deliberatly hunting is the more destructive behavior.

Uses the oddball *.eye5 *777 *.in2 ~= to ID older species members(in2 is randomly increased, 777 is zero). I'm still trying to figure out exactly how it's working so we can make use of it. I think it might just be because of the veggies' *.in2 being zero, but I've yet to test it.

Moonfisher:
It definately seems like it's a sort of vegan conspec
Still nice though, in the bots world it's the only difference it needs to reconize at that point.

The bots in my sim don't seem to have a conspec, but they all move in more or less the same direction wich seems to make confrontations rare.
They rarely fight over anything other than an alge, since the bots recently got very good at keeping the alge alive it seems to be getting more important to be able to "steal" an alge from another bot since all the alge are usual occupied.

But what I'm realy hoping for is a predator that feeds mostly on other bots. I've seen a few bots grow big and travel in the oposite direction to harves oncoming bots. I even saw one that seemed to actualy reproduce... but they've always had some problems, usualy they just don't reproduce, and the one I saw who did had it's aim broken and shoot comands broken.
The whole neural network structure is slowly being broken down, so I'm not sure how much further I can take this thing.
I think amplification could make it more interesting, but I still think I need to make a mod to actualy generate the network gradualy if I realy want to get somewhere.

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