I've been running my own canni bot (
Enitor Comesum) in an evolution sim to see if it degrades itself worse than it is. I set it at the largest sim size because it's just really inefficient otherwise, and I wanted to make it hard to find food.
Currently I'm getting about 50 cycles/sec with 100 vegs and 100 bots. I'm averaging 1 mutation every 30 generations for the bots, and 1 mutation every 140 generations for my plants. Plants are at 5K mutation rates all around and Comesum is at 10K all around.
What is a good rate for generations/mutation? Too high and it just slows things down obviously. Too low and it will actively kill of the bots. This is mostly for shvarz I suppose.
First things the plants do in the last 5 or 6 simulations I've run is get rid of limitations on reproduction. That is, they turn cancerous. This makes sense when you're getting 5 energy/cycle per bot, and there's an artificial limit of 100 bots at a time. Definately evolution at work on that one.
The second major change in veggies occured just recently. 14 5 rnd store evolved, which makes the veggy behave in a drunken stupor, which confused the heck out of the cannis. Their population dropped to 50 in only a few hundred cycles.
At any one time in my sim, only about 5% of bots have any alive children. This isn't because they're eating their children so much as only the bots near food have any energy to spare for reproduction, and further out the bots have to eat each other to survive.
Also, about 10% of bots at any time can trace their ancestory to a living bot. So I think there's evidence of strong selective pressure (am I right?). Very little branching of the genome is possible.
All mutations thus far for the bots have been neutral. Out of 10 mutations in a genome of 162, none have negatively effected any part of the genome. Which would seem to imply that all the genes are functioning in such a way as to maximize the individual fitness of the bots.