Potential Benefits of Bot Altruism

[SlyStalker]

Hi everyone! Lately, I've been reading up on the effects of kinship-driven altruism. Here's a short summary: Organisms that lower their potential to breed while increasing another's (by sharing food etc.) greatly increases the chance of genes that are similar to its own to be passed on to future generations. This is because the altruistic animal is more likely to share food/help if the animal that it is helping has genes similar to its own. So anyway, I was thinking, what if we could implement this in Darwinbot DNA as well...? I already have a basic one going but I can't really see if it's working because it just reproduces too fast!!!  But I think this idea could help with other bots so I'm just presenting this idea out here. 

[Numsgil]

It's tricky to set up a sim for it, because cheating has such obvious short term benefits.  If you're familiar with teh "haystack model", I think that would be the best way to try and get this working in a evolutionary stable way.  Basically have a bunch of sims that are normally running independently and unconnected, and then connect them for a while periodically.

[SlyStalker]

But would it be helpful in a competetive or 'league' (is that what its called?) match to have more bots alive and contributing?

[Botsareus]

The only cheating I am aware of is robots no reproducing at all or reproducing constantly with a child 1% body transfer.

I am not sure, is this what you guys are talking about?

[Numsgil]

For a league match I think the world is just too small to support more than one species.  At the very least you need enough room for bots to hide a bit.  Shapes would also be a good option.  You can create random objects which block line of sight and allow some areas to be semi-isolated from each other.

[SlyStalker]

What I mean is would it be helpful to your species is some of the 'well-off' bots shared their energy with the weaker bots to help them survive too?

[Numsgil]

There isn't much cost to reproducing, so if a bot has extra energy it probably makes more sense to reproduce and make a new critter instead of trying to save an existing bot (maybe it'll reciprocate in the future, maybe it won't).

You could definitely build a sim with a species that did this, but I would expect the sharing "gene" to break after several generations.

[SlyStalker]

what about in a competitive match?? and what if its only a small percentage of the giving bot's energy?

[Numsgil]

It might make sense in a competitive match.  You'd have to try it and see if it's worth it or not.

[SlyStalker]

When I try it, energy particles go flying everywhere! D: Then I set it so that they only fire -2 particles at point-blank range but then they don't fire at all! 

[Numsgil]

You need to match their velocity vector, and then only fire when the two bots aren't moving relative to each other.  That might be harder than it sounds if they're both trying to match each other's vector.