DB reworks

[jknilinux]

OK, on the wiki it mentions several "reworks" of DB by different people. The ones I found were:


Botsareus's_Vision: An alternate Version of 2.37.4 tweaked by Botsareus

Non-deterministic: An Alternative version of 2.36 by Carlos designed to allow inter-gene competition

DarwinBots2.37.7b is a reworking by Endy.
Fixed a bug involving limitless waste creation caused by storing negative values into .strvenom and .strpoison
Modified code to allow slime/shell/venom/poison to be unmade for an energy gain
Negative stores/inc/dec are now absoluted
Stores/inc/dec to values greater than 999 are now modified to be within 1-999 range; ie. 31330 would be stored to as 33

I just copied-and-pasted all info I found on the wiki regarding these mods. Would someone like to explain what, exactly, are the differences between these versions and the mainstream ones? Why aren't they in the main code line? What were the shortcomings/advantages of these? Will any of these features, such as those in the "non-deterministic" mod, be incorporated into DB#? Thanks!

[Numsgil]

At various times people have some ideas they want to explore that don't necessarily need to be made default.  Since DB is open source, one of the advantages is that you can open the source and tweak things to work differently.

I don't especially plan to incorporate any of the changes from other branches, since they usually involve breaking changes.  Carlo's non determinism branch, for instance, had bots execute one gene per cycle, chosen at random.  I see where he was coming from with it, but it wasn't something I really agreed with.

[jknilinux]

What did botsareus do in hi/er/s? How did the non-deterministic one work?

[Numsgil]

I'm not sure what bots was working on.  You might be able to dig up some old threads.

Non determinism one worked like you'd expect.  Some bots did better than others.  Bots with only one gene anyway were unaffected.