Overall league thoughts

[Moonfisher]

I'm very much against any coustom code put into veggies... what's the point of making rules against rape if you can just write your own veggy ? The whole reason rape is dominating the F1 league is because you can rape alge and put an entire genome in them over a few cycles.
If you want to allow viruses, raping or coustom buildt veggies then you need to give like 1 nrg per kilo veggy and have high costs for body mass or something... but in the end I definately recomend not letting anyone mess with the veggies... it's currently the strongest dirty trick in F1, so it's definately something we wouldn't want in this league I think.
Just saying, currently the 2 top bots in F1 are holding that position because they put their genes in the alge... it's a great advantage to controll the alge in a sim, but it's completely overpowered when you can get enough dna in the alge fast enough. (Atleast for viruses you need to channel the virus before it can fire)

I do agree that a specific alge for the alge settings in the league could be a good idea... but I think it should only reproduce and regulate body if anything, no movement or anything like that...
Also you can choose to regulate how much energy is delivered as body vs nrg, so you can probably just balance it right for Alga Minimalis. (Maybe make it reproduce less often or something)

I think most of the current costs are fine as they are... except maybe shell and poison could be more expensive for this league... but we should try to do the math and realy balance shell/poison and shot costs... not sure exactly how much and all, but somewhere around -1 shots removing shell at a lower costs that creating shell and -6 shots costing more than the shell they remove... I think... I'd aim somewhere in that neighborhood.

I agree we need atleast medium fluid resistance, but if it's not hard enough then I vote for more fluids resistance rather than messing too much with costs... I think shel and poison are what realy needs to be balanced, no need to make it all complicated by making litle tweeks on eveything...

Not sure how I feel about day and night cycles... I don't realy see the point I guess... and hamstring food and defending your veggy breeding ground to slowly end up controlling all veggies in the field is a strategy I would be very exited to see someone use... I mean that's pretty close to antbots. At least there's some interesting behavior there. And since you can't use mem shots or positive .tieloc values then you can't force veggies to reproduce or anything like that...
And the field size and fluids should already force people to keep the alge they find alive, bots that kill the veggies will dies of starvation as they deserve

And didn't finish reading everything... but I think I noticed most new stuff in here

[jknilinux]

Moonfisher- I think we've pretty much agreed already that if thick fluid resistance isn't enough, then we'll modify the costs more, but I still think the lowered age costs etc... are good ideas.

The point of day/night cycles would be to limit the veggy population and energy to low levels I guess- wait what was the reason?

Alright, and no custom "symbiotic" veggies.

[bacillus]

I do agree that Alga Minimalis may be a little unsuitable for this; how about writing a different one that spreads itself, eg. moves a large distance for a few cycles then fixes itself? Just having all the veggies clustered together is making the league a gold mine hunt rather than a test of survival.

[Peter]

Well, I think we should try it with and without an energy cap in the trials, and see how it goes. For those trials, the new list of best bots to test might be Bouncer, Caterpillar, and Bacillus' 3rd-to-last ant. Where is that ant anyway?

Bouncer should be a nice trial bot to start with. I see it as the start and possibly the end of shot-bots in this league. It is decent shot-bot. I doubt if a normal shot-bot(F3-style) in the thick fluid conditions could do much better then this bot.
I think the current conditions are plenty enough for a proper designed tie-kinda-bot to win from it.

Caterpillar, sorry to say. But I think this bot isn't fully able to survive jet. I think less then bouncer at the moment.

I wonder how the ant-bot will do. I even wouldn't be much suprised if it couldn't survive properly.

I can agree with thick fluid, keeping the F1 tie costs, and a high pop. cap where we instead regulate veggies with day/night cycles. Very low (non-zero) age costs and 8 nrg per turn for veggies also sounds good.

For the gold-mining spoken where bacillus had it about. I would go for a high starter amount of veggies. And a amount of 8 nrg per turn or even less, and less starting nrg for every veggie. That way you'll get a higher spread and veggies with less income. The extra spreid of veggies will be more fair, becouse every bot will have a more equal change for veggies.
I will too be better for many bots at starters, so if more agree. We should look how an F2 will do. I hope most survive in starters but kill themself becouse all veggies are gone.

By the way, what are etches?

If I said it it are edges.  (amazing how I wraped english there)

Otherwise it hasn't got anything to do with DB I wouldn't care.

Moonfisher

I think most of the current costs are fine as they are... except maybe shell and poison could be more expensive for this league... but we should try to do the math and realy balance shell/poison and shot costs... not sure exactly how much and all, but somewhere around -1 shots removing shell at a lower costs that creating shell and -6 shots costing more than the shell they remove... I think... I'd aim somewhere in that neighborhood.

Do -1 shots remove shell?

[jknilinux]

Well, I'm hoping the ants can survive- if they can't, then there might be something wrong with the rules. Or maybe it's just that the ants are SB(single bot)s, and the current IBBL rules are very against SBs.
Anyway, once welwordian finishes his fungus-bot, that might be good to include in the fine-tuning trials too. I still think caterpillar should be included as well once you get it working- maybe looking at PY's inchworm2 could help with the design of it. I also agree that we should include a random F3 bot, just to make sure that it can't survive there. You never know...

Bacillus- I agree, gold-mining is a problem. And I don't think we should just start with a lot of vegs like peter suggested, having few vegs was one of the more important points in this league. So, in my opinion, the modified veg should move around randomly like you suggested for a few cycles- maybe even having them move constantly is a good idea.

[Peter]

I've got to say, I underestimated my caterpillar. I put into the sim, and some later it had a population of 1200. The low costs on dna and the non-paying costs for movement becouse of the tie-moving are a bigger point then I thought.

For the random F3-bot, don't forget bouncer is an F3-qualified bot. Even one of the strongest bots in F3.
The other strong bot ''big'' from moonfisher, have I just tested in the conditions, within a minute it died. It didn't like the edge.
In F3 they're pretty close in strength. In this sim ''big'' fails completely. The difference....

I think ''gold-minig'' should be made less by decresing the nrg-input of a veggie, decreases colony volume. And I want it more
equal for some bots by having multipe veggies spawnd in the beginning with a lower starter nrg. Bots still have to look for new veggies, but will have to look for many to get a powerful nrg-source.

[jknilinux]

Well, that's great that caterpillar works.

Anyway, even if you decrease nrg input to the veggies, you'll still end up with "colonies" of vegs that will basically make the bot who randomly finds them first win. The colonies may be smaller, but they're still colonies. I still like the move-for-a-few-cycles-after-birth idea more- the bots will need to have interesting hoarding strategies to contain their herd of veggies in one place.

Ikke-
By the way, why would day/night cycles be better than a regular pop. cap or nrg cap?

[ikke]

Ikke-
By the way, why would day/night cycles be better than a regular pop. cap or nrg cap?

When used a pop cap is an instant replace if a veggie dies.
Balance by nrg input is not something I have had working.

[jknilinux]

Rules 0.6:

- Add 20 random shapes at beginning of tournament.
- No memory shots.
- No venom.
- No viruses.
- Very high (10x?) Poison costs
- Very high (10x?) shell costs
- Size 12 field.
- Non-toroidal
- Alga minimalis-based veggy that moves randomly for x cycles after birth, where x is between 10 and 1000. Note that it will move slowly, so large numbers for x are preferred.
- Low veg repop threshold (200?), Veg repop 1, long repop delay (5x?), high veggy population cap (5000?), low energy cap (), fed 8 nrg per turn, fed per kilobody, day/night cycles enabled.
- Thick fluid resistance.
- F1 costs, with slightly higher (2x?) movement costs, no/low code execution costs (0.5x?), and low (0.1x?) age costs.
- Only negative tieloc values allowed.


Probably unnecessary, but should be kept in mind:
- (?) slightly lowered per-bot costs (0.5x?)- I didn't recieve any feedback on this...
- Decreased bang efficiency (30%?)

Random values that I think sound OK for the details are in parentheses.
Did I miss anything???


---

My home PC broke last week, so we'll need to rely on someone else to run the sim testing the settings with the new caterpillar and bouncer... Moonfisher? Peter?

The most monkeying around will need to be done with the veggy settings, to make sure they are sparse, low nrg, with caterpillar & bouncer barely dieing when they reach repop threshlod (we don't want bots to survive when the vegs are at repop threshold- they need to control the veg populations themselves), and the veg population needs to vary somewhat significantly on it's own with the day/night cycles. That way, if two bots are tieing so far, then maybe the auto-changing veg populations will make the bot that can best survive in both cases the winner.

Also, perhaps we should try to make caterpllar survive somewhat better than bouncer, just as a rule of thumb to make sure it's an IBBL. If Bouncer keeps beating Caterpillar, we should increase movement costs and/or decrease bang efficiency. Otherwise, the settings will be good as they are.

There,
The next rule list should be final. After that, we'll finally start the IBBL thread.

If there are any suggested replacements to my random values, and the suggested values still allow Caterpillar to beat Bouncer while killing Big (from F3) and keeping sparse low-nrg veggies, then I'm fine with it.

[Peter]

Well the catterpillar against bouncer. 1409 bots against 0 bots in the end in my sim, so the conclusion is clear I gues.
(In F1-conditions it loses with 9-2)
Both versions 0.1:0.2 lose anyway. 0.1 can't shoot properly. 0.2 just stops if it sees an edge or object.

Catterpillar isn't completely ready. Maybe the earlier time I saw it survived in that kind of conditions it was even an lucky situation.

I'm not sure if I do something serious on the bot in the coming time. Main reason I posted it was becouse I didn't see me looking at it for a little time. And it did already behave somewhat proper. I'll see when I have time and feel like doing something on it. I dislike the amount of tie-communications that have to be thrown into it, to let it behave better for my feeling.

Anyway, those repop numbers. In my test-sim I use a repop of 10. Maybe that is the reason caterpillar dies every time.

I suggest this league-settings keep open as long as possible. Anyone may want to try some kind of antbots in some league-settings. And possible have a tryout fight with bouncer. I wonder how settings would have to be changed to get the ants survive and bouncer not. I believe that will be difficult, very  if not inpossible.

[abyaly]

I know you're all for making the league more complicated, but I think you're adding a lot of unnecessary baggage. The purpose of the rules is to eliminate trivial strategies so that complex ones flourish. Any additional proposed rule should be supported with a potential exploit that it is eliminating. If a rule is not eliminating an exploit (which leads to a simple and effective strategy) then it does not belong on the list.

Here are examples of rules that eliminate a problem:
-no info (agressive) use of ties prevents the Fruitflies/Etch tactic of splitting to minimal body and maximal numbers.
-movement interference with larger field size makes powering forward at maxvel no longer the most effective food searching strategy. It is not necessary to increase movement costs in addition to reducing speed, because eliminating traditional movement doesn't actually help us. The real issue is the effectiveness of simply driving forward all the time, which could easily be reproduced using an inchworm engine.
-Non-torroidal is there to prevent wacky MB teleportation that wrecks MBs.
-Veggy repop reduction is there to prevent the "sit and wait" strategy that becomes viable when large numbers of veggies are always appearing.

These are all rules that are necessary to allow complexity to be prominent. Removing any of them limits the possibilities of the league.


Here are examples of extraneous rules that do nothing to help the (supposed) goal of this league:
-New, moving, algae.
-Random shapes.
-Movement removal or suicidal movement costs.

These rules force contrived complexity, and are not necessary for complex bots to do well. They just raise the minimum "bar" for complexity required to be able to make a league bot. They don't really expand the pool.

So before you finalize your ruleset, review it to make sure that each of them is critical for the goal that you have set. If the rule is not there specifically to fix a problem, then the rule does not belong on the list.

[jknilinux]

ARGH! Bacillus, I feel your pain. My post got wiped too, I posted it a few days ago. I just noticed today that it isn't here... Maybe it's a website problem?

Anyway, here is basically what I said:


Peter-
You said caterpillar wins 1409-0, and then that both versions lose anyway. Does it win or lose to bouncer?

Also, I never tried running a size-12 sim before, so maybe it's smaller than I thought. The intention was to make it impossible for the bots to survive at repop threshold, so they must control the veggy population on their own. So, maybe we should not even have a repop threshold- just set it to zero. If they eat all the veggies until they hit zero, then those bots deserve to die.

With the antbots- it should be pretty easy to make a surviving antbot, right? Just take bacillus' antbot, and wherever it says .up, .dn etc... replace it with caterpillar's movement genes, then just cut-and-paste caterpillar's "initialization" code to turn the antbot into a caterpillar as soon as it is born. It's a caterpillar where all logic is just copied-and-pasted antbot genes.


Abyaly-

Just because something isn't necessary doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

Shapes- force bots to recognize shapes, and provide a complex environment
Moving algae- eliminate gold-mining. This isn't to encourage a specific behavior, just to prevent the winner from being decided randomly as the first one to find the big colony of algae.
Movement costs- encourage tie-movement and MBs

This is not, in my opinion, very different from:

Few veggies- encourage conservative feeding behavior.


---
However, this is just me. If others agree with abyaly, I'd be happy to eliminate those rules, but I'd like at least peter's, moonfisher's, numsgil's, or bacillus's opinion before I make any drastic changes.

Also, has anyone tried these settings yet? If so, did everything look about right? Was the veggy population kept low, yet naturally oscillating? Do bots with no veggy "conservation" genes kill all the veggies on their own? I'd really appreciate suggestions!

[abyaly]

Why not just make all bots be able to run through a maze before they are eligible for the league? Because that type of contrived restriction only enforces your vision of a specific type of complexity.

I thought the distinction between this and the various bot challenges is that rather than forcing bots to adapt complex behavior, this league would let it rise to the top by getting rid of easiest super-optimized grey goo strategies. The rules do not need to (and should not be trying to) do anything except that.

Every rule you add lowers the accessibility of the league by adding another hoop a potential bot would have to jump through. Before you add a rule, you should ask yourself if the added complexity is justified by the benefit that rule provides.

Just because something isn't necessary doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

Yes, it does. There are exactly the same number of good rules and necessary rules.

Shapes- force bots to recognize shapes, and provide a complex environment

A complex environment just places more burden on bot writers without cutting away any bad things from the league. You want more bots written, so you want additional work for bot writers to be justified.

Moving algae- eliminate gold-mining. This isn't to encourage a specific behavior, just to prevent the winner from being decided randomly as the first one to find the big colony of algae.

We already have a way of dealing with random chance. It's a pretty good one. We don't need another.

Movement costs- encourage tie-movement and MBs

Why is tie movement better than regular movement?

This is not, in my opinion, very different from:

Few veggies- encourage conservative feeding behavior.

The key strategy used by early fighting bots to hunt for food in a very energy efficient way was sitting in place and rotating. No energy was expended on anything else until food was located. Would you like this to be an effective strategy? If so, make sure it is very easy to find food without going anywhere. An easy way to accomplish this is to make sure lots of veggies spawn.
Since this is the exact type of thing this league is being designed to prevent, I think you should see why a smaller veggie repop rate is justified.

The justifications for your rules are not very different from

Few veggies- encourage conservative feeding behavior.

They have in common that the reasons provided are not enough to justify the rule being created. Veggie conservation is NOT a requirement, so we don't need to force it on the bots.
However, it may end up that veggie conservation turns into a good strategy as a side effect of us getting rid of trivial strategies. It may also end up that it doesn't. We don't know, so we don't want to just pick one and gear the rules to encourage it.

[Peter]

Peter-
You said caterpillar wins 1409-0, and then that both versions lose anyway. Does it win or lose to bouncer?

I didn´t say caterpillar wins. I first said the numbers where 1409 against zero, not stating a winner. Later I said they both lose. Not very good placed, but I thought it was clear  . Anyway caterpillar loses bigtime.

Also, I never tried running a size-12 sim before, so maybe it's smaller than I thought. The intention was to make it impossible for the bots to survive at repop threshold, so they must control the veggy population on their own. So, maybe we should not even have a repop threshold- just set it to zero. If they eat all the veggies until they hit zero, then those bots deserve to die.

I used size 12 becouse I thought it would give a good first proper idea. I think it is needless to start with a higher field and more veggies. You can always calculate the amount of veggies towards the bigger field. Think of the lag you will have with the 5000 veggies you suggested somewhere. Testing first in 12, later we can see further.
And even in that field I did't look that much forward to see if bouncer killed itself after a while after conquering the field. A pop of 1500 is really slowing down and bouncer is really don't doing much that costs energie if there are other bouncers around him, in the end it will probably be killed by standard bot costs like code execution, body costs and age costs. As those are not meant to be costly, it will survive very long without new energy. At that time the bot probably already won a fight together with breaking the ecosystem(veggies) and any income will be the repop. If that isn't enough to live then many will die out, the ones left will search for new veggies that possibly already multiplied themself, in the end probably enough for a new explosion of bots. And we move in a circle.

With the antbots- it should be pretty easy to make a surviving antbot, right? Just take bacillus' antbot, and wherever it says .up, .dn etc... replace it with caterpillar's movement genes, then just cut-and-paste caterpillar's "initialization" code to turn the antbot into a caterpillar as soon as it is born. It's a caterpillar where all logic is just copied-and-pasted antbot genes.

If it was that easy, I would already have made an powerful F1 or F2 MB-league-bot. It isn't just that easy. You could use the basic initialization and use the ties to go up or down. But how would you go left,right or turn properly fast,( the original can't even do it completely how I like it).And how would I transform something like ''50 .up store''? Exspecially if you look at the fact that the movement isn't straight forward but comes with bursts.
Often you can put genes from one bot in another. Even if suceeded the bot with the new genes will probably have trouble with it, they will often behave lesser. Like trying to play games on linux.

Abyaly-

Just because something isn't necessary doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

Shapes- force bots to recognize shapes, and provide a complex environment
Moving algae- eliminate gold-mining. This isn't to encourage a specific behavior, just to prevent the winner from being decided randomly as the first one to find the big colony of algae.
Movement costs- encourage tie-movement and MBs

This is not, in my opinion, very different from:

Few veggies- encourage conservative feeding behavior.

Shapes don't have a high use right now, if there is proof founded they are needed to let complex survive better against non-complex.
Moving alge couses a higher spread of them, thus easier to find, thus killing complex finding ability a little.
Movement costs, already said but I think friction will do it. Leave it untill needed.

Also, has anyone tried these settings yet? If so, did everything look about right? Was the veggy population kept low, yet naturally oscillating? Do bots with no veggy "conservation" genes kill all the veggies on their own? I'd really appreciate suggestions!

No, haven't tried. Next time you post settings please try to look how it seems yourself. Otherwise it is just randomly guesing. You can try to fiddle with costs to keep an antbot win/draw against bouncer. I still think something like that is very hard. If you succeed the league is probably ready.

[Numsgil]

I haven't read everything, but I agree with abyaly that the primary goal should be eliminating gray goo strategies instead of trying to encourage complexity.  F2 is really F1 without the exploits (tie feeding was originally an exploit, which is where the league came from).

A league with shapes and stuff is probably a good idea, just not for F2.