Do you run evo-simulation?

[Greven]

Have you ever run a evo sim?

If you have, what have developed and evolved of interesting bots / behavior?
But then again what is interesting bots / behavior? Be critical and no lying :rolleyes:

Read this post first! (it is a post by me from the evo sim topic in hints, tips and tricks ....)

[Botsareus]

I kinda did , but not in db.

Here is a list:

[you]Make a robot fight me:[/you]


Robot Sneacks up and attacks from behind , moves faster then turning ratio , no way to win. (I would of done better if I was not too lazy to use the up and down keys, but it was calculating faster then me anyway, slim chance) (This is done with only one dna and retrys)

[you]Make a bunch of robot eat one tiny food source in the middle of the screen:[/you]

Robots line up in to a snake and eat the food in a line , like they are standing on line , they share energy but are not killing each other for food.

Finaly my favorete:

[you]Crank Up your AntiVirus and make an .exe file reproduce and mutate:[/you]

AntiVirus was closing illigal copys until it totaly messed up the antivirus window, I have this some were in another post, It did not close the window , it kinda made a "work of art" out of it.

[PurpleYouko]

I normally run evo sims to test the limits of the software so naturally they crash more than most people's do.

A couple of times I have just run a few million cycles for the hell of it. Almost invariably my robots end up losing the ability to move then dying a slow painful death.
They even do this while chasing an active veggie like my Rabbit or Shvarze's Alga Grexa.

I am not going to give up though.

I will figure out a way to make these darned things evolve properly even if I have to rewrite the whole evolution system.

I think the main problem is that there are never any ecological niches for evolution to exploit.

[shvarz]

Almost invariably my robots end up losing the ability to move then dying a slow painful death.

Hint: Turn down the mutation rate :)

[PurpleYouko]

Hint: Turn down the mutation rate

The last set that did this (5 times consecutively) was run with a mutation rate set to 25,000 on the largest possible sim size, using moving veggies (Rabbit in this case)

At the beginning, my simple robots were able to chase the rabbits and feed on them. A robot would continue to feed this way until.
1) The veggie died.
2) The bost lost the veggie due to an abrupt course change on the part of the veggie.
In both these scenarios the bot typically has upward of 20,000 energy an so it goes into a spasm of multiple birthing. This results in a large group of robots in an otherwise empty space with no veggies anywhere in sight.
Sometimes a robot will lose its conspec recognition and eat all of its siblings while they just sit there doing nothing or spinning on the spot
The next time a veggie passes by, the surviving bot/s from the litter more often than not either can't follow it or just plain aren't interested in it.
Eventually after a few million cycles (usually less than 20 accumulated mutations) they all just sit there and ignore everything around them till they die.

I had this sim set on auto-restart and it did so 5 times over a period of well over a week. Each extinction was for the same reason. Lethargy!

[PurpleYouko]

I reckon my stsrter bot must be prone to natural selection which takes it up an evolutionary dead end.

The survivoors seem to be those that take out siblings with little or no movement.

 :(

[shvarz]

The next time a veggie passes by, the surviving bot/s from the litter more often than not either can't follow it or just plain aren't interested in it.

Most of the off-springs must be just as good at hunting rabbits as the parent.  What you describe sounds exactly like "Muller's ratchet".  Also, your rate of mutation accumulation is 5 times higher than mine - I get 4.3 mutation per million cycles (or about 6 mutations per 100,000 born bots).  All of this tells me your mutation rate is too high.

How long is your bot's DNA?  
How quickly do you see "average mutation" graph go up?

[PurpleYouko]

For several generations the offspring remained as good as (in fact mostly identical to) the parent.
It was only after mutations started to accumulate that the problems began.

Tell you what. I will post my start-bot and Rabbit into the beastiary and you can try it out for yourself.

[Botsareus]

Ok , The only explonation I see is that for some reason after reproduction somthing causes the parants to die off.

Look at the logical side of things: Ok, A robot gave burth and lost some energy in the prosses, but if the robot reproduces with twice the energy it started the simulation with, and the energy it started the simulation with is enough for it to find food and reproduce. Why the hell is it dieing of if the parants dna is supposed to remain unchanged?. Maybe they simply lose the abilaty to reproduce?

Anyway I beleave the problem is there somewere , once again somthing is causing healthy robots to die.

I mean really what kind of scifi is this: a robot generation is unable to turn and move but is able to kill off all its parants...

[shvarz]

PY, I tried your start bot and it can't shoot its own shit.  It just truns away from rabbit whenever it sees it.  Could you post the settings file you use?  And also check that you posted correct file.

[Endy]

Haven't ran the bot yet but I saw at least one problem with it in regards to mutation. That last gene uses *.eye5 != as a condition for avoiding conspecs I'm assuming that you expect it to be comparing to 0 but if any loose value is inserted and not gotten rid of the bot could start rotating for no reason. Normally insertion seems to be the most useful or neutral mutation but for this bot it'd be detrimental.

Endy B)

[Greven]

Eventually after a few million cycles (usually less than 20 accumulated mutations) they all just sit there and ignore everything around them till they die.

This and the spinning PY is describing is actually what I always get to!!!???

Why is that? I often have atleast around 500 bots, but suddenly, 495 of them
starts to spin on the spot, and they die out. The last 5 runs maddely around to find food and die! PING! The sim is over!!!

What I also wrote in the evo sim topic, I think the problem with DB is not lack of complex envoriment, but because the DNA structure is so tight that most mutations are bad, and it is so complex we have a very hardtime to find the problem/bugs, because so much can interfere with this: All the genes of a bot etc.

Few people have the time or opppertunity to run sims worth 10 millions cycles or more, and therefore then simple answer to that is setting the mutation rates high (meaning more mutations), this is not desirable, and a lot of mutations, as pointed out by shvarz, in a short time makes bad sims, because natural selection have a hardtime to pick out the best bots(you know what I mean).

Over the weekend I will try to stechout a new DNA system, and post it. I know this is a tabu, but I think if we need to get over the last edge we need a new DNA structure.

Taking into account that it will not make the older bots incompatible with the new system, and I know it will take 100 hours of coding and very much is need to change, but we need it! I would volentieer to help coding if needed!

[PurpleYouko]

Haven't ran the bot yet but I saw at least one problem with it in regards to mutation. That last gene uses *.eye5 != as a condition for avoiding conspecs I'm assuming that you expect it to be comparing to 0 but if any loose value is inserted and not gotten rid of the bot could start rotating for no reason. Normally insertion seems to be the most useful or neutral mutation but for this bot it'd be detrimental.

Endy B)

The whole point for inserting the "*.eye5 !=" condition is to stop it spinning. Remember *.eye5 is always renewed on every cycle so it can never hold a stray value.
This condition is designed to make sure that the robot can only rotate if it is actively seeing something at the time.

[PurpleYouko]

Over the weekend I will try to stechout a new DNA system, and post it. I know this is a tabu, but I think if we need to get over the last edge we need a new DNA structure.

Nothing is tabu here.

If you come up with a superior system then we use it. If you don't then we won't. Simple as that.

[PurpleYouko]

PY, I tried your start bot and it can't shoot its own shit.  It just truns away from rabbit whenever it sees it.  Could you post the settings file you use?  And also check that you posted correct file.

I have just taken a look at the robots again and I did find one problem in the current settings setup that will stop the sim working most of the time.
You will notice that the start bot has a speed limit of 20 while the rabbit can currently go faster than that. Try adjusting the start bot such that it is a little faster than the rabbit. (originally the rabbit was slower but I sped it up) I hoped that faster bots would arise through mutations.

I don't see any problem with the bots turning away from the rabbits. They work just fine here. They can't keep up with the rabbits but they sure as hell chase them.

Here is my settings file.

I will double check my robots in the beastiary to make sure they are the right ones.