Author Topic: Restricted Breeding  (Read 3393 times)

Offline Aurin Cluff

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Restricted Breeding
« on: April 06, 2009, 12:51:37 AM »
Has anyone else noticed that the tighter the restrictions on reproduction the better evolution sims work out?
Waxless,

Aurin Cluff

Offline Moonfisher

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Restricted Breeding
« Reply #1 on: April 06, 2009, 12:57:34 PM »
Well if you're mutating a handcoded bot then if your repro gene has one condition and that condition mutates, then it will most likely stop reproducing, or be unable to stop at all, eihter of which would be fatal at some point. But if it has several conditions, then one broken condition is less likely to be fatal.
But the larger and more complex your reproduction gets the more likely it is to mutate, so it also works the other way around.
Running a zero bot sim atm, and the initial reproduction was triggered by a combination of some values, angle and a store, scattered through the DNA. But at some point it anaged to achieve something along -7 -407 rnd store, causing it to produce a small offspring from time to time. (I'm pretty sure it has a good reason for using -7 and not 7, since it used to produce a litle shell and poison before which should be an advantage, but a positive value aparently has a negative effect in one of the sysvars between 0 and 407...)
Anyway the point was that by significantly reducing the length of the reproduction it reduced the odds that it would mutate and became far more stable and allowed biodiversity to increase.

Also the rate at wich you reproduce counts, since you're only affected by point mutations unless reproducing or launching a virus.
But having more offspring also increases the possible outcomes, the dna may be compromized but the chances for something new to evolve are higher. (Fruitflies did surprisingly well on IM as a virus after having infected a seasnake, and I'm pretty sure EricL had default mutations on it)

So... theres pro's and cons to the rate and complexity around reproduction. I think it depends a lot on the kind of bot you're using and the mutation rates.

Offline Prsn828

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Restricted Breeding
« Reply #2 on: April 20, 2009, 12:18:13 PM »
You are right about there being pros and cons, but with the current reproduction methods it is vastly simplified compared to real reproduction, and I think that is a flaw in DB.

Perhaps DB3 will be able to fix this when it introduces the concept of chromosomes and codules, by which you could have a codule that causes reproduction, and yet that codule could mutate, allowing the method by which the bot reproduces to change.
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