Author Topic: Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled  (Read 9532 times)

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« on: October 25, 2009, 08:33:42 AM »
Started new zerbot simulation with "voluntary movement" cost set to 1 and "bang efficiency" set to 10% from the start.
The goal is to see new movement methods develop, using ties etc... So far 1,5M cycles, nothing interesting is happening...

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2009, 03:57:36 AM »
OK, 3,5M cycles, still no reproduction, but some bots started to rotate  

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2009, 02:12:37 PM »
4M cycles, still no reproduction.  
Maybe I'm doing something wrong. How do I know when bots are capable of reproduction?  

Offline ikke

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #3 on: October 26, 2009, 03:48:49 PM »
Quote from: Drognan
4M cycles, still no reproduction.  
Maybe I'm doing something wrong. How do I know when bots are capable of reproduction?  
euh an increase in population??
If you have no reproduction the only mutation you have are pointmutations, make sure they are enabled. After that it is just waiting till some store hits .repro

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #4 on: October 26, 2009, 05:08:10 PM »
Quote from: ikke
Quote from: Drognan
4M cycles, still no reproduction.  
Maybe I'm doing something wrong. How do I know when bots are capable of reproduction?  
euh an increase in population??
If you have no reproduction the only mutation you have are pointmutations, make sure they are enabled. After that it is just waiting till some store hits .repro


Veggie is feeder/repro, as is described on wiki. Population oscilates between 90-150 due to dynamic costs enabled. Should I remove that veggie and introduce feeder only veggie?

Antoher question...    How do I know when some store hits .repro? (Don't know about programing, I'm medical doctor, sorry...   )

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #5 on: October 26, 2009, 05:24:51 PM »
          Removed feeder/repro veggie, introduced feeder only veggie and population still rising!!!!!!!! Yes!!!!

Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #6 on: October 26, 2009, 07:52:00 PM »
Quote from: Drognan
4M cycles, still no reproduction.  
Maybe I'm doing something wrong. How do I know when bots are capable of reproduction?  

It depends exactly how you've set up the settings.  For instance, if you have it set so that new zerobots get spawned if the population falls below some threshold, then it's sort of difficult.  You could look for the best bot and see how many children it has produced.  If the zerobots don't get auto-reseeded, you could just look at the count of the total bots, and see if it ever rises.

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #7 on: October 27, 2009, 03:07:29 PM »
OK, new approach  
30-50 zerobots that survived so far with feeding only veggie and max mutation. I'll wait till population graph start rising. Then I'll lower mutation rates and wait till they learn to feed. BTW how can I see if they started to feed on their own?    Then I'll swap feeder veggie with alga minimalis and wait till movement starts.
Settings are: Bang efficiency set to 10, movement cost 1, zero costs when population fall till 40, no respawn, no dynamic costs.
Thank You for answers so far

Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #8 on: October 27, 2009, 04:47:27 PM »
There isn't an easy way to check if the bots have started feeding beyond just looking for shots or ties.  Once you get a basic bot that can eat and reproduce and move, it becomes difficult to exactly see what new behaviors they start to develop.  But you can use the graphs to record things like population and average energy, and see if they increase/decrease over time.

Offline Ta-183

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #9 on: October 27, 2009, 06:08:07 PM »
Zerobot evosims are a total pain in the ass. Not only do you have to micromanage them for a few days, you have to run them for a few days to begin with. And THEN you have to keep track of autosaves, check for improvements every time something interesting happens, ect.

It's a painful balancing act. I never really got anything interesting to develop. What's more, I always ran mine on an old rig with an outdated P4 processor.... so the sims never really went over 15M cycles.

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #10 on: October 28, 2009, 03:16:11 PM »
Quote from: Ta-183
Zerobot evosims are a total pain in the ass. Not only do you have to micromanage them for a few days, you have to run them for a few days to begin with. And THEN you have to keep track of autosaves, check for improvements every time something interesting happens, ect.

It's a painful balancing act. I never really got anything interesting to develop. What's more, I always ran mine on an old rig with an outdated P4 processor.... so the sims never really went over 15M cycles.

You are right, lost patience, at 10M cycles no repro. Probably dead end  
Restarted the whole thing and started again with same settings....  At the moment 7,5M cycles, no repro  
I'll wait and see  

Offline Ta-183

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #11 on: October 28, 2009, 05:19:40 PM »
I usually DID get reproduction EVENTUALLY, just no useful behaviors ever really developed. It always seemed like they would evolve to drift in a certain direction and shoot constantly.

Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #12 on: October 28, 2009, 07:47:56 PM »
When you're running the very start of a zerobot sim, it's useful to talk about bp-cycles.

That is, calculate:

Number of cycles * number of bots * number of 0s per bot.

A bot with 1000 0s running for 1 Million cycles has roughly the same chance of reproducing as 1000 bots with 10 0s running for 100K cycles.  The cheapest way to make your bp-cycles larger is adding more 0s to your zero bots.

Offline Drognan

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #13 on: October 29, 2009, 09:43:22 AM »
Passed 7,5Mcycles, no repro!



Quote from: Numsgil
When you're running the very start of a zerobot sim, it's useful to talk about bp-cycles.

That is, calculate:

Number of cycles * number of bots * number of 0s per bot.

A bot with 1000 0s running for 1 Million cycles has roughly the same chance of reproducing as 1000 bots with 10 0s running for 100K cycles.  The cheapest way to make your bp-cycles larger is adding more 0s to your zero bots.

Thank You... I'll insert some new bots with more 0s...

Offline Numsgil

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Zerobot evolution with voluntary movement disabled
« Reply #14 on: October 29, 2009, 12:30:17 PM »
You might also want to check that the bots are indeed mutating.  After a while (a few million cycles), double click on one and examine the DNA.  If it's still all 0s, then the mutations are disabled somehow...