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Darwinbots 3 Progress

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bacillus:
That sounds reasonable; I think that the rate at which a cell can change its substance should slowly decrease over time.
About the shell, at the moment it looks like there is three ways of doing it: Make the shell out of nothing (no change), digest minerals that are then used to build a shell, or make minerals structures that can be loosened from or fastened to other minerals to manipulate the shape of the environment into a shell, which can then be used as a sort of communal shell.
More as an idea to throw back in, I still think that a cell wall for retaining energy and keeping the bot intact is worth thinking about. Could make for some pressure interactions as well, as currently 'chewing' is impossible to simulate and invariably results in the prey shooting right back out.

Prsn828:

--- Quote from: bacillus ---That sounds reasonable; I think that the rate at which a cell can change its substance should slowly decrease over time.
About the shell, at the moment it looks like there is three ways of doing it: Make the shell out of nothing (no change), digest minerals that are then used to build a shell, or make minerals structures that can be loosened from or fastened to other minerals to manipulate the shape of the environment into a shell, which can then be used as a sort of communal shell.
More as an idea to throw back in, I still think that a cell wall for retaining energy and keeping the bot intact is worth thinking about. Could make for some pressure interactions as well, as currently 'chewing' is impossible to simulate and invariably results in the prey shooting right back out.
--- End quote ---

You have a good point; the processing power this might require, however, at first frightens me.  There could be a few ways to do it: 1) little particles in a bot bounce around, and if they go fast enough, they fly through the cell wall. 2) standard pressure calculations to determine if a bot is about to "Explode"

These two possibilities have complimentary, almost opposite downsides.

1) this is memory intensive, and possibly also slightly processing intensive.
2) this is process intensive, and depending on if shape is accounted for, could be slightly memory intensive.

Now, I know a few complicated algorithms might be able to remedy this to a degree, but in the end, it would have a huge effect on the speed of the simulation.
To put it into perspective, I believe the goal is to have it run reasonably fast at about 1,000 bots, which in DB2 is just a pipe dream.  Every cycle, assuming 1,000 bots, the system would have to execute 1,000 DNA's, update 1,000 bots, process the velocity, acceleration, inertia, momentum, rotation, collisions, and torque of at LEAST 1,000 objects; all that, and to make the speed reasonable, do it about 15-30 times every SECOND.

As you can see, every little thing you add in has an effect on how much the computer has to do, so adding even just 10 particles of energy per bot would greatly influence the speed.  Looking at it this way, it is possible to use technique 2, but the math is tricky, and if we run into any trig we might as well just forget about it, because computers and trig are not good buddies

Numsgil:
There is something in real life called an extracellular matrix which is basically anything abiotic (ie: not alive) that a multicellular critter uses to form its structure.  I just have no idea how to introduce something like this here, because it ultimately needs to be controlled from the DNA.

Prsn828:
Seems pretty simple to me, actually, I doubt we even have to code it in.

As long as cells can only survive while they are not being squeezed too much, it is likely that the bots will evolve to use sand or something similar as an outer layer as well as a connection to other bots.

In that way, as long as the bots can to some degree manipulate the objects it is connected to, it can use the sand or whatever it may be using at the time as that extracellular matrix layer.

We may want to allow for some ties though, so that there is an exclusively information based connection allowed between bots, as using the sand in this way would block the cells from touching.

Depending on the physics we implement, this sand-wall layer could also act as a collision buffer, effectively dispersing the forces from a collision.

Moonfisher:
If we're going to run sims on PC's then I don't think processing power is something we should be spending lightly.
DB isn't the real world, and IMO it doesn't have to be in order to simulate evolution. Obviously the closer it is to reality the more interesting the results would be to observe, but I still think the more processing power is required the more we should be looking for a cheaper way to fake it.
Having grains of sand sounds like a bad idea to me, I can't immagine how this would run properly on a normal PC, unless you want to have very few grains which would defeat the purpose.
You COULD allow objects to be made of a certain mineral, so you can place a sand wall that bots can extract materials from... stuff like that.
Or you could maybe make sand grains with no colision and very simple physics if you realy want the actual grains to be there I guess.

But my point is just that for evo sims it takes a loooong time for anything new to sart happening, and it'll take even longer if we add too much new stuff.
Theres other simpler areas I'd find more interesting to change, like the jerky tie physics and generaly tie comunication when using several ties. Or the triggers for shooting and tie feeding that require you to hit -3 .shoot store to fire venom for instance, on top of needing to actualy produce the venom and set .vloc to something usefull... I haven't heard of any zbots ever using venom and I have to admit I doubt they will get there till we have some sick future computers running DB at 10K cycles a sec.
Just saying we all have a very short limited lifespan, and the way the current DNA works I'm not even sure most of us will live to see half the sysvars being put to propper use.
So it might be a good idea to make it easyer for the DNA to evolve more gradualy to see some faster progress in evo sims.
One thing that could help when shooting and tie feeding is allowing a certain negative range to trigger a reaction rather than an exact value, but I think the whole way the DNA works and evolves could probably be set up in ways that favor random mutations far more than the current language (Although the ways I can immagine would make the DNA impossible to read, but you could probably parse it into something more readable somehow).
I don't know how real DNA works though, so I don't know if the current way is more realistic, but DB is a fake universe after all, so I don't think it would be cheating too much.
Also from the few things I think I recall about real DNA it would seem to me like what I have in mind is actualy more realistic... but I may be wrong, will go read about it on wiki...

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