Author Topic: Mutation Sims  (Read 35738 times)

Offline Botsareus

  • Society makes it all backwards - there is a good reason for that
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 4483
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #30 on: May 19, 2005, 07:39:40 PM »
I truly agree with Greven here, I dont know mutch about it , but personaly was arguing for a while with the crew over here that: "Evolution in Db does not work"
The only truly meaningfull thing I got out of them was the e-grid idea, hopefully that will help out , but if it does not , then we know for sure that somthing is wrong with the program.

(And no , I was not the first one to suggest the e-grid idea, been a while)

Offline Endy

  • Bot Overlord
  • ****
  • Posts: 852
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #31 on: May 20, 2005, 02:30:49 AM »
I zeroed the delete data location mutation after noticing that all of the false mutations appeared to be from it. Seemed to fix the problem completly, with the Mutation Info area actually giving meaningful results and all mutants being legitimate.

Endy B)
« Last Edit: May 20, 2005, 02:57:34 AM by Endy »

Offline shvarz

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 1341
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #32 on: May 20, 2005, 10:55:54 AM »
Greven, regarding your comments in the "Do you run evo sims?" thread - did you look at the file that is attached to This Thread?  There is a comparison of original bot and the evolved bot - look at all the changes!  What do you mean DNA structure is not flexible enough?  It is very flexible and allows a lot of changes.  When Nums finds time to implement the junk DNA idea it will be 10 times as flexible as it is now.
"Never underestimate the power of stupid things in big numbers" - Serious Sam

Offline PurpleYouko

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2556
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #33 on: May 20, 2005, 12:33:33 PM »
I still say it isn't so much the DNA structure that is the limiting factor as that the program itself limits what the DBs can actually do.
To some degree these are inter-related but not entirely so.

Another example. The much misunderstood and maligned .sexrepro.

Fact: It doesn't work properly.

But then that isn't the point I'm making.
If DB was truly open ended then it would have to be possible for robots to spontaineously develop a DNA instruction which would allow sexual reproduction to work.
They did it in nature!
But there is no way for a DB to do this because they can only evolve abilities which we have previously hard coded into the program.

It would be simple enough to allow mutations to make changes like .aimsx into .aimfx or .aimsg but the program wouldn't know what to do with them.

What the heck would  .aimfx do anyway? I have no idea but wouldn't it be cool if the program had some way of doing something with it anyway?
I can't really think of any way to implement this but I am certainly overworking my grey matter in an effort to do so.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world
Those who understand binary.
and those who don't

:D PY :D

Offline shvarz

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 1341
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #34 on: May 20, 2005, 12:37:15 PM »
A friend of mine (programmer) some time ago mentioned some programming language that can define it's own commands.  At least that's how he explained it to me.  I'll see if I can find out more.
"Never underestimate the power of stupid things in big numbers" - Serious Sam

Offline Endy

  • Bot Overlord
  • ****
  • Posts: 852
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #35 on: May 21, 2005, 05:37:41 PM »
I wouldn't say sexrepro is a total loss. It does seem to help mix up the species dna somewhat. I've seen a bot with a bad mutation have it's children "cured" after a sexrepro with a normal bot. I've used it on plants and they started flying in opposite directions top/bottom so as to meet each other at the middle. It does however seem to crash the sims more often.

There could be a good reason the bots avoid some mutations. The bots are only striving for adequate mutations. If it takes multiple steps and one of the initial steps is detrimental it would be unlikely to evolve. The birth tie provides a guarantee that the bot will eventually seperate, a tie-removal gene requires that the bot tie then deltie. To deltie however the bot must use the same number, the most likely result being that the bot will not and instead of helping the tied mother/child will hender each other.

The reason why TF doesn't evolve is similar, it requires storing values into tieloc,tieval, and tienum. Shareing, however, can and has evolved since it only requires one number stored.

Shots probably are the best feeding method actually. The incomming shots come almost straight to the bot, they're in relativly small quantities that allow babies some chance of surviving. The bots can then randomly subtract 5/3 from the -1 and lose waste or gain body. Shootval could also have a num randomly stored into it to increase either range or power.

I'm trying to understand game theory so as to help figure out what gives the bots the best payoff evolutionary speaking. From what I can tell a sort of Retaliator bot would be the best for mutation sims. If it is attacked by a canni it responds in kind, if the neighboring bot is peaceful so is it. The only problem is ID between a Canni attack and an accidental discharge, and attacking long enough to have an impact.

Endy B)
« Last Edit: June 29, 2005, 01:40:48 AM by Endy »

Offline S.o.G.

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 10
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #36 on: June 14, 2006, 01:04:45 PM »
Quote from: Endy
I'm trying to understand game theory so as to help figure out what gives the bots the best payoff evolutionary speaking. From what I can tell a sort of Retaliator bot would be the best for mutation sims. If it is attacked by a canni it responds in kind, if the neighboring bot is peaceful so is it. The only problem is ID between a Canni attack and an accidental discharge, and attacking long enough to have an impact.

Endy


In my latest sim, which is pond mode with fixed alga in the top third, an unfixed alga that spawns at the top (and so floats to the bottom) & mobile I flammi as veggies and a DI to which I added float at birth, sink at age 2500 genes, the bots have evolved a retaliator strategy after at 3 million cycles. They only retaliate when bumped into hard, or hit with feeding shots during feeding. It has started to evolve away though, there is a more aggressive strain. They still don't chase other bots, but they sometimes attack them when they come too close.

This sim is really stable. The pop ranges from 70 - 150 following day night, with a much much flatter curve than that of the blooming fixed algae. A while back there was a mutation that was reproducing in the morning, and the bot population spikes were actually preceding the alga bloom spikes. It didn't last though.

Offline maheshjr2000

  • Bot Neophyte
  • *
  • Posts: 35
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #37 on: July 07, 2006, 12:47:34 PM »
To address the problem that  DB takes up too much power. Im building a medium sized beowulf cluster if I can find a kernel that will let me run it like a normal computer(this is available in linux right?) So hopefully soon we should find out if extra power will help or not. I agree with most of the people here that DB is becoming a game however I feel that the some of the caps are neccessary to simulate real world conditions. I dont feel that the DNA language is that limiting because (to my knowledge) it works as real dna does. Real dna executes a string of commands in the form of ATGC does it not?

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #38 on: July 07, 2006, 01:18:07 PM »
FYI, the VB version is single threaded.  You would be wasting you time running it on a cluster.  It doesn't scale.
Many beers....

Offline Numsgil

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 7742
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #39 on: July 07, 2006, 02:27:21 PM »
It's possible in the future that a version will be built that could take advantage of a relatively small cluster, but I see the main advantage eventually being increasing the actual size of the sim.  More bots instead of faster simulations.

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #40 on: July 07, 2006, 02:30:48 PM »
FYI, I'm working on local multi-instance sharing as we speak.  That will be a highly parallel way to lever multiple CPUs.
Many beers....

Offline Zinc Avenger

  • Bot Builder
  • **
  • Posts: 56
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #41 on: October 13, 2006, 09:50:35 AM »
I've been trying to run decent evo sims for a while now, my major breakthrough came when I completely disabled Point mutations. This allows each mutation to be evaluated for the entire life of the bot, so a bot that is "improved" by a mutation is not going to get a negative Point mutation to kill it off before it has a chance to pass on the goodness.

I'd also recommend setting an oscillating Mutation Rate, with 1 cycle at 16x and then 5 (or so) at 1/16x. This way there is a one in six chance of a high-mutation reproduction and a five in six chance of a low-mutation reproduction. This allows the dna to do some mutating, but if a bot is successful then five sixths of its offspring will be relatively unmutated. I find this strikes a nice balance between getting serious mutations and letting natural selection reward the fit.

Offline Testlund

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 1574
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #42 on: October 13, 2006, 11:54:34 AM »
That works if you run a sim with any of the default bots. I usually have point mutation set to 10 000 000 when running with those, but in my evosim where the bots started with only 13 zeros in their dna I had to set point mutation to 1 000 000 for anything to happen at all. This gets changed by delta mutation over time though. Zerobot sims are more challenging I think. I whould recommend giving it a try.    But one needs to have patience because it can take weeks before a functioning bot evolves. I'm at 13 million cycles but only got 39 offsprings. It's running 24/7 on my old computer.
« Last Edit: October 13, 2006, 11:57:17 AM by Testlund »
The internet is corrupt and controlled by criminally minded people.

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #43 on: October 13, 2006, 03:30:53 PM »
I wonder whether one can conclude from this thread that 4 billion years ago, external, radiation induced mutations were critical to evolving the first replicators from the amino acid soup, but then once the basic mechanisms for evolution are in place - reproduction, etc. that external point mutations become the least interesting type of mutation and can even be detremental....

BTW, the posts above w.r.t. scaling on multi-cpu machines no longer apply.  Teleporters in 2.42.8 allows for multiple DB instances to cooperate on a single OS image, allowing as linear scaling on multi-cpu machines as the underlying OS allows.  Way cool.
« Last Edit: October 13, 2006, 03:33:13 PM by EricL »
Many beers....

Offline Zinc Avenger

  • Bot Builder
  • **
  • Posts: 56
    • View Profile
Mutation Sims
« Reply #44 on: October 16, 2006, 05:59:37 AM »
Interesting theory, I've always seen Point mutations as harmful, but I'd never considered them as the original driving force in starting the whole thing off. It certainly sounds plausible! I guess Point mutations would become even more harmful once you start getting multibots/multicellular organisms, nobody wants their left kidney to suddenly start moving around on its own or start to produce venom

On a similar note, I've been trying to "vaccinate" a bunch of not-top-rate bots like C. Ancestralis against some of the best by creating a weaker strain of predators (remove .repro and add randomised conditions to a few of the more important genes) and defining them as veggies with a very low pop cap and very very low rate of energy input. It requires a lot of supervision (killing off the predators if they get a little too successful, adding in the occasional batch of non-veg zerobots with high initial energy when the sim is getting a bit low on energy and occasionally repopulating the predators), and although I haven't had any dramatic successes they're starting to move in the right direction.

On your recommendation Testlund I shall prepare a zerobot evo sim. Does anyone have any recommendations for a good setup for this? I'd hate to evolve something useful only to have the entire thing go extinct on me minutes later!