Author Topic: Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time  (Read 10091 times)

Offline ikke

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« on: July 17, 2008, 04:06:45 PM »
Out of curiosity: what is the shortest time anyone has ever evolved a selfreplication from a zero bot?
At the first attempt I had 100 new bots after 150 k cycles. After that poor dynamic cost set up killed them all  
Now (my second attempt) I am at 1.7 m cycles and nothing

Offline EricL

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #1 on: July 17, 2008, 05:05:28 PM »
Depends on several factors.  Longer starting zerro-bot genomes should shorten the time it takes to evolve a replicator.  Also, a low waste threshold may result in replication due to altzheimers before the DNA to replicate has evolved.  

In the sims I've run with relativly short genomes (30-100 base pairs) and no waste threshold, I generally see replicators in less than 10M cycles.
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Offline Numsgil

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #2 on: July 17, 2008, 06:13:25 PM »
From my experience, if you allow viruses you'll first end up with primitive viruses that create new viruses by storing running through all the memory locations and incrementing them.  A side effect of this will be reproduction.

Offline bacillus

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #3 on: July 22, 2008, 08:15:23 AM »
The problem is with intentional reproduction is that it requires several parts put together in the right order. Feeding is easy enough, you just need .shoot dec, but reproduction needs the condition which needs to evolve first, a logical value between about 20 and 80, not to mention that without a conspec the new bot will eat its parent or be eaten, and all this has to survive further mutations. At best, a low mutation rate would ensure that replicators survive for a maximum amount of time, even though they will take a long time to appear. How do you apply evolutionary pressure to force reproduction?
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Offline EricL

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #4 on: July 22, 2008, 11:53:36 AM »
Quote from: bacillus
How do you apply evolutionary pressure to force reproduction?
Its the other way around.  How can you have evolutionary pressure without reproduction?  You can't.

Zerobots eventually hit on some way to periodicially reproduce by unconditionally writing to .repro or .mrepro.  Point mutations cause this, the only mutation type that occurs outside of reproduction.   Some bots end up with DNA that attempts reproduction every cycle.  They rely on the body limit to determine when reproduction actually happens.  Others do it periodically e.g. every 1000 cycles as they walk through all the sysvars incrementing them using .robage or similar.  You don't need conditional logic to evolve replicators.

In fact, reproduction is actually much easier to evolve then feeding via .shoot.  It's quite a sophisiticated thing for there to be sufficient selection pressure to favor .shoot.  I've never seen it occur in zerobot sims.   There has to be significant benifit for it to be favorred and selected for and without aiming, which requires vision, which is very sophisitcated, random shooting doesn't tend to convey enough benifit to be selected for in my experience.  At least not yet.   What is way more common is for bots to vary some other aspect such as their speed to maximize the chances of hitting nrg shots from shepards.  You also see reproduction itself used as an indirect means of feeding.  If you reproduce when you have the nrg/body to do so, then more of your phenotypes will happen to be where the food is, such as near a shepard or the act of reproducing will slow you down when you hit an nrg shot, increasing the probability you or your offspring will hang around where the food is.  I've seen early replicator zerobots rely on this mindless coincidence between reproduction and feeding many times.

Conspec recognition is only important if you hunt or reproduce sexually or otheriwse have some something to do with others after you're born, which as above, all requires sophisticated DNA I've never seen evolve.  There is no need to recognize your conspecs if you have no way to harm them or don't need them to reproduce.
« Last Edit: July 22, 2008, 12:05:57 PM by EricL »
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Offline ikke

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #5 on: July 22, 2008, 03:20:27 PM »
Quote from: bacillus
How do you apply evolutionary pressure to force reproduction?
Evolutionary pressure forces reproduction speed The lower edge is determined by minimum body / energy requirements and the upper by ageing cost and / or degradation by point mutations.
Quote from: EricL
In fact, reproduction is actually much easier to evolve then feeding via .shoot.  It's quite a sophisiticated thing for there to be sufficient selection pressure to favor .shoot.  I've never seen it occur in zerobot sims.   There has to be significant benifit for it to be favorred and selected for and without aiming, which requires vision, which is very sophisitcated, random shooting doesn't tend to convey enough benifit to be selected for in my experience.  At least not yet.
Hmm, looks like I'm in for the long haul. I have a sim set up trying to do this. I evolved replicators as veggies and am now trying to evolve a saved version into a feeder. I have costX negative to sustain them and a field full of veggies for lunch. You never got this working??

Offline EricL

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #6 on: July 22, 2008, 03:58:52 PM »
Quote from: ikke
You never got this working??
In a word, no.  No one to my knowledge has ever evolved anything as complex as a bot that can hunt or see, starting from a zerobot.  There is even some uncertainty as to wether anyone has ever evolved a zerobot that deliberatly utilizes conditional logic to make a decision.   Trafalger as put in for the Conditional Logic prize and I have been too lazy to review his entry.  My bad.   He gets the prize no matter what, I just need to find an hour or two to rub together to walk his entry.  

This said, most evo sims were run prior to the in-line conditional DNA logic change, which should make evolving conditional logic more likely.  Additionally, the use of self-throttling shepards and preditors which control their hunting effectiveness via .totalmyspecies and .totalbots is a relatively new invention and one which IMHO, holds great promise for applying selection pressure in such a way as to directly favor the evolution of complex behaviour.

If you want my $0.02 on how to best accelerate the evolution of complex behaviour, I would recommend against using negative costX because it is sim wide and does not favor individuals.   Better is to use veggy shepard bots that shoot nrg shots.   In this way, bots can evolve to aquire more nrg individually by stopping near a shepard, following it, increasing their body and thus their cross section, increasing the probability of a nrg shot hitting them etc.   Favorable adaptations in individuals are selected for.    Have the shepards target the bots with good accuracy at first, even follow them around if you want, but have them get more and more random (or shoot less pwoerful shots, or less often, or move away, etc.) as populations grow and the evolving bots gain effectiveness.  Writing the right shepard for the right evolutionay stage of your sim is the best way IMHO to apply the right selection pressure at the right stage of evolution to drive evolution towards complexity.   Eventually, the shepards can turn into preditors that prey on the bots, etc.  Hopefully someday, we will have what we see with evolved bots that began as hand coded bots in Internet Mode and that is that the evolved bots are very very hard to beat with hand authorred code.  Hopefully there comes a day when you can't write a preditor your evolved bots can't eat.

Oh, and I shoudl correct myslef above.  I have seen selection favor bots that constantly shoot feeding shots in sims with zero costs.  The probability of them bumping into something and gettind fed is sufficient to favor this adaptation.  What I have never seen is active targetting or conditional shooting when something is in view or comes into contact.  Unconditional shooting of feeding shots is on par with unconditional reproduction w.r.t. the ease of evolving it from a zerobot.
« Last Edit: July 22, 2008, 04:19:40 PM by EricL »
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Offline Endy

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #7 on: July 23, 2008, 01:15:17 AM »
Just wanted to say that you can get alot of the same effects from waste build-up. Reproduction and share-feeding(w/ties) are the easiest to get this way. Probably similar to what happened in nature, a chemical process promoting replication prior to a self-replicator appearing.

The bots do seem to favor either continous or periodic actions over normal conditional logic. I think most of has to do with the problems associated with conditions breaking down from mutations, might be interesting to run a test to see.

Offline ikke

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #8 on: July 23, 2008, 02:01:18 PM »
Quote from: EricL
Oh, and I shoudl correct myslef above.  I have seen selection favor bots that constantly shoot feeding shots in sims with zero costs.  The probability of them bumping into something and gettind fed is sufficient to favor this adaptation.  What I have never seen is active targetting or conditional shooting when something is in view or comes into contact.  Unconditional shooting of feeding shots is on par with unconditional reproduction w.r.t. the ease of evolving it from a zerobot.
Okay, youre talking about shooters vs hunters. I'll settle for shooters right now and see if I can take it from there.

Offline Numsgil

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #9 on: July 23, 2008, 02:11:20 PM »
Vision has gotten much simpler to use in newer versions since conditions can now be in-body.  The simplest conditional feeder might look something like this:

.repro inc
*.eye5 50 >
.shoot dec

Offline EricL

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #10 on: July 23, 2008, 02:54:27 PM »
Hell, I'd be happy to see ANY vision related DNA being conserved, even something like

*.eye5 dec


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Offline Peter

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #11 on: September 06, 2008, 05:55:22 AM »
Quote from: EricL
In a word, no.  No one to my knowledge has ever evolved anything as complex as a bot that can hunt or see, starting from a zerobot.  There is even some uncertainty as to wether anyone has ever evolved a zerobot that deliberatly utilizes conditional logic to make a decision.   Trafalger as put in for the Conditional Logic prize and I have been too lazy to review his entry.  My bad.   He gets the prize no matter what, I just need to find an hour or two to rub together to walk his entry.
Where is that sim of Trafalgar?
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Offline Shasta

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #12 on: September 06, 2008, 07:35:05 PM »
Quote from: Peter
Where is that sim of Trafalgar?
I believe its here: link and link

Offline Peter

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Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #13 on: September 07, 2008, 03:33:11 AM »
Quote from: ikke
Out of curiosity: what is the shortest time anyone has ever evolved a selfreplication from a zero bot?
At the first attempt I had 100 new bots after 150 k cycles. After that poor dynamic cost set up killed them all  
Now (my second attempt) I am at 1.7 m cycles and nothing
If you want to get a replicator fast, you can get one in a few minutes, maybe a few thousend cycles. All you have to do is put the point mutation at 1. Problem is that  most replicators forget replicating as soon as they learned. But there will come new bots anytime that way.

Quote from: Shasta
Quote from: Peter
Where is that sim of Trafalgar?
I believe its here: link and link
Ah good, thanks. Well if that is the smartest zerobot around, evolution really came far.
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Offline MysticalDumpling

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Re: Q: shortest zerobot reproduction time
« Reply #14 on: January 26, 2014, 08:53:04 AM »
The shortest time ever was 30sec  8). I used 10,000 random numbers from -32000 to 32000. It had a huge lag, however...  stable repro usually occurs around 3-7h, the first bots to reproduce often kill themselves from sheer fertility... Figures.
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