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DB3 Questions
Numsgil:
I wouldn't call it XP. It's more like a snapshot of what the bot's been doing the last several thousand cycles, that provides feedback when new muscle is created, or maybe modifies existing muscles (I'm not entirely sure yet).
If anyone can think of a better way to control specialization with DNA that's not entirely arbitrary I'm all ears
Understand, though, that bots would still control building muscles, etc. and the high level ratios involved. The specialization of those muscles is what's handled automatically.
The problem is that specialization is something like a really unbalanced tree. General muscles might make you a little bit better at everything. Movement muscles might make you better at moving. "up" muscles might make you better at moving forwards.
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Veggies mostly build mass, so I imagine any "muscles" a veggie has would be to allow them to build more chlroplasts/chlorophyl at a higher efficiency. Or maybe I treat chloroplasts like a muscle that can become more efficient, so each chloroplast provides more energy or something like that.
Houshalter:
Would you have to modify alga_minimalis to make chloraplast. Also I am in favor of a menu that would let you change the costs and benefits of different muscle types. As you said, specialization is like an unbalanced tree. If the default values make one stragtegy even slightly more benificial to the bots survival than another, diversity is thrown out the window. To force diversity and specialization on the bots the costs/benifits have to be perfectly balanced or at the very least you have to make it so an ecosystem can't survive without certain niches being filled.
I read up on Lamarckism. Its interesting. Even though it may not apply to real biology, darwinbots isn't exactly real biology. I don't think it should apply to musscles or specialization. Instead mabey make it optional for a bots genes to degrade more or dissapear entirely when it doesn't use them and attempt to modify the genes that are used alot and make them more complex. Multibots would count every gene in every bot in the multibot when they do this. Im not sure if it would work or how but its an idea.
Numsgil:
--- Quote ---Would you have to modify alga_minimalis to make chloraplast.
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Yes, but it'll have to be rewritten either way to use the new system.
--- Quote ---Also I am in favor of a menu that would let you change the costs and benefits of different muscle types. As you said, specialization is like an unbalanced tree. If the default values make one stragtegy even slightly more benificial to the bots survival than another, diversity is thrown out the window. To force diversity and specialization on the bots the costs/benifits have to be perfectly balanced or at the very least you have to make it so an ecosystem can't survive without certain niches being filled.
--- End quote ---
There'll be a "maximum" which represents 100% energy efficiency that I'll use as a cap, so things can't get too crazy. Within that 0-100% range I can probably give global multipliers for each level of the tree.
--- Quote ---I read up on Lamarckism. Its interesting. Even though it may not apply to real biology, darwinbots isn't exactly real biology. I don't think it should apply to musscles or specialization. Instead mabey make it optional for a bots genes to degrade more or dissapear entirely when it doesn't use them and attempt to modify the genes that are used alot and make them more complex. Multibots would count every gene in every bot in the multibot when they do this. Im not sure if it would work or how but its an idea.
--- End quote ---
Lamarckian evolution/soft inheritance works on phenotypes, not genotypes. Meaning it only makes sense for traits and not on a genetic level. I just don't see a clean way of doing specialization in DNA. All the schemes I can think of involve having dozens to hundreds of essentially sliders that bots would have to tweak, with arbitrary reasons (cost, efficiency, etc.) why bots shouldn't change them too fast. With a hybrid hard/soft inheritance like I'm proposing we allow genetics to handle behavior (the "brain") and the system to handle capability (the "body"). Considering how much of the bot's body is already automagically handled (reproduction is handled very automagically, for instance), it seems a good fit. Bots still decide on how much muscle/fat, etc. to produce. The system just handles how that is distributed on a finer level.
If we really want to have a strictly genetic component to body management I might play around with a baser level genetic code to handle the body. It probably wouldn't work like current DNA. Maybe more like the genetic code in DarwinPond where it's just an array of sliders that get tweaked over time with mutations. I just don't see a clean way of having all those slider values exposed on the DNA level, especially since you don't want bots changing specialization in the middle of a fight, and you don't want body management to be so hard that bots can kill themselves off just by tweaking values too aggressively.
Houshalter:
Well girraffes stretch their necks and so over time they grow longer necks and their children are born with longer necks to. If and when having a longer neck no longer becomes nessacary then why keep it if it just takes alot of energy and resources to grow in the first place? obviously this is not how girraffes or any other animal evolved to be what it is but it would be a quick and easy adaption as opposed to thousands and millions of years of evolution and hundereds of thousands of generations. You could make this apply to darwinbots by increasing deletion mutations or copy error mutations for genes that aren't used in a bots life time. Genes that are used alot would have a chance of being copied then being modified. A single gene that cooridinates movement, for example, could become two independent genes which coordinate movements in different directions (left, right, backwards, forwards, etc.) This line of thought seems to become real complicated real quick but I think a fully Lamarckian alife sim could be doable. I would love to see the results of soft inheratence vs. our standard random mutation and natural selection evolutions.
Numsgil:
--- Quote from: Houshalter ---Well girraffes stretch their necks and so over time they grow longer necks and their children are born with longer necks to. If and when having a longer neck no longer becomes nessacary then why keep it if it just takes alot of energy and resources to grow in the first place? obviously this is not how girraffes or any other animal evolved to be what it is but it would be a quick and easy adaption as opposed to thousands and millions of years of evolution and hundereds of thousands of generations. You could make this apply to darwinbots by increasing deletion mutations or copy error mutations for genes that aren't used in a bots life time. Genes that are used alot would have a chance of being copied then being modified. A single gene that cooridinates movement, for example, could become two independent genes which coordinate movements in different directions (left, right, backwards, forwards, etc.) This line of thought seems to become real complicated real quick but I think a fully Lamarckian alife sim could be doable. I would love to see the results of soft inheratence vs. our standard random mutation and natural selection evolutions.
--- End quote ---
Mostly the problem is that, in real life and in Darwinbots, defining what a "gene" is is rather complicated. Segments of DNA spatially isolated from each other might work together to form what might be called a "gene". I guess you could keep a tally of how often a given bp is executed, and mutate unused ones. Though that won't catch all junk DNA.
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