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Toy Planet: candidate for DB3?

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Ammeh:
For my final year project for university I was given the title "Toy Planet" with the brief that I was to create some sort of a-life simulator. My tutor suggested I just build a straight up genetic algorithm with a population of animals and veg, and measure the tendency for particular schemata (alleles, basically) to evolve.

I thought that idea was boring, so I built a simulator capable of simulating agents with "dna".  The dna was a string of characters of any length which acted on a simple 10-item stack, performing basic conditional jumps (jump if greater than, jump if not zero, short jump etc.), setting a state (veg, eat, mate) and moving up/down/left/right. I allowed the mutation rate of individual agents to be mutated itself, and sought to prove that evolved mutation rate is a function of dna-repair costs and sustained biodiversity. In the paper itself, I actually messed that up, but after I'd submitted it I figured out why, and actually managed to get exactly that result :D

Anyways, in a lot of ways it's similar to Darwinbots, which is why I bring it up. Not only will you guys probably be interested in playing with it, but also I specifically designed it in a modular fashion so that huge changes to the processing of DNA, physics etc would be very easy.

What this means is that there currently exists a framework which can very easily be modified to incorporate the best features of Darwinbots, with much cleaner code, and native cross-platform support (it's in Java). Also, the networking stuff is already set up because the university let me run it on their distributed computing rig :3

I can't release it yet because I have to wait for marking to finish, but there's some info and a live sim that you can view at http://www.ameliapollard.co.uk/EvoSim/.

Any thoughts on this as a potential candidate for DB3?

Botsareus:
look beast, definitely interested in playing around with the actual program.



--- Quote ---Any thoughts on this as a potential candidate for DB3?
--- End quote ---

Well, not really. Numsgil has been spending a lot of time designing very complex system with 4 point polygons and fluid dynamics. Most of it is over my head. However, a lot of the concepts you describe Numsgil wants DB3 to have. Anyway, Numsgil should be able to clarify further.

Peter:
Probably not, but maybe some parts can be integrated. Current DB3 project is made in Microsoft Java(C#) so I don't think porting stuff would be too hard.

..but I got to play around with Toy Planer to actually say something informed about it.  ;)

Botsareus:
'Microsoft Java' , funny

Numsgil:
Shasta also made an alife program a while back for school.  See this thread.

I'd let you take the DB3 moniker except I do actually plan on finishing eventually  :blueblob:  Plus I think you should pursue your own "brand" anyway.  That way you aren't forced in to any sort of conceptual pigeon holes and can make the simulation work like you want.  For instance it sounds like your universe exists as a uniform grid with bots living inside grid cells?  But I always considered the actual physics engine behind Darwinbots one of the unique elements that makes it so distinct and cool.

We can set up a sub forum for it here on these forums once you can release it, though.  I don't mind at all giving hosting resources to other ALife sims.

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