Open Source evolutionary simulation of social bots

[meph]

Hello everyone, this is a follow-up to a thread I posted here a while ago:
http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php/topic,3382.msg1382424.html

It was about a simulation that is similar to DarwinBots, but has some different I/O conventions and brain dynamics.

I finished porting the simulation (originally done in Python) to C++. It now runs MUCH faster, and can handle many more agents. I also made it Open Source and posted it on google code
http://code.google.com/p/scriptbots/

Some predator prey plots I usually get:


I also made a short video just talking about it for a bit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSmlKAly1UE

I'm posting here because I thought some of you could be interested. I was pretty happy with some of the behaviors I was able to observe, on a high level.

There are two discrete types of agents now: Herbivors and Carnivors. Herbivors eat food, and Carnivors eat Herbivors. I was able to observe individual hunting techniques and good steering in carnivors. They also learn pretty quickly to avoid things of the same color (which are to high degree of confidence their descendents). For herbivors, I saw many that learned how to escape from Carnivors, come up with manuvers that seemed to be designed to fool carnivors (go to left and then sharply turn right and boost), and behavior where herbivors started to impersonate carnivors by emitting the same color that carnivors did.

I was unable to observe too much coordinated behavior, such as hunting in packs, or something like that. I believe this to be way out of the scope of the project because of the low amount of sensors, the sizes of the brain, and other environmental variables such as length of a life, etc.

I think a much better environment to compare to would be some bacterial life forms. Does anyone know of animals, or systems that have predator prey dynamics, but are very simple? Maybe some worms, or fishes?

Any suggestions of other things I could be looking for, or other simulation mechanics I could develop to get them to be more social? other types of brains?
Cheers!
-meph

[Shasta]

That looks really interesting, nice job!

One thing to look for would be the herbivores using mimicry to blend in with the carnivores. In your video the red/green simulation had attract and avoid based on color, seems like it would be possible for some kind of mimicry to emerge.

If you want them to be more social, I would definitely look into some kind of signal input / output. We have the .in0-9 and .out0-9, but only hand authored bots use them (as far as I know). It would be interesting to see how your bots would handle it, maybe just three or four on/off toggles. I'm not too sure on what else might help.