Author Topic: Using Animal_Minimalis as a veggie?  (Read 4218 times)

Offline PhiNotPi

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Using Animal_Minimalis as a veggie?
« on: February 07, 2014, 07:57:57 PM »
I'm sure someone has had this idea before, but I haven't seen it mentioned. 

I've been trying to evolve a better robot, which I shall call Ultra, and I want it to become a better fighter.  I feel that using a passive veggie would probably not provide the correct selective pressure, since the feeding robots would not have to deal with being shot at.  In addition, I must have Animal_Minimalis set a veggie in order to make sure that it is not wiped out.

The main problem is that the Animal_Minimalis is able to eventually wipe out Ultra over time.   This doesn't mean that my robot is weak, as it easily wins in a 15v150 fight between the two species.  The problem is that, in this setup, one side effectively gets an infinite backup energy supply.

The food chain looks like this:
"Sun" → Animal_Minimalis ↔ Ultra
It is easy to see why the flow of energy into Animal_Minimalis is greater than the flow into Ultra, so it eventually wins over time regardless of how strong Ultra is.

I've tried a few handicaps to try and weaken Animal into a suitable veggy, such as fixing in place and giving a very low starting energy.  Fixing in place reduces the possibility of "ganging up" (so each Ultra bot only had a single enemy at time), but it gave rise to a weird "invisibility" bug in which a few of the fixed bots would act invisible to the other bots.  Giving it a low starting energy did not change much, because it also reduced the food supply for the Ultra bots.

I tried to fix the problem by adding a second veggie (like Alga_Minimalis), but that did not work out too well either.   There began to be the problem of certain Animal bots gaining enough energy so that they could stay alive perpetually.  They could kill any single Ultra bot which tried to feed off of them, and prevented the spawning of Alga since there were enough veggies to meet the minimum.

Is there any settings which I might change in order to make this work?  I need to find a balance in which the Animal population can be continuously re-spawned, but without causing the extinction of the Ultra species or the Alga veggie.

Is there a way to set a maximum energy for Animal? Would I have to code that into the bot?
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Offline MysticalDumpling

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Re: Using Animal_Minimalis as a veggie?
« Reply #1 on: February 07, 2014, 08:04:14 PM »
I probably know no better than you on this... You could just break their conspec so that the bots have evolutionary pressure from each other. If you try this, though, it is a good idea to put a gene that prevents attacking bots under some age, like 150 so that the bot does not kill it's children.
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Offline Botsareus

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Re: Using Animal_Minimalis as a veggie?
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2014, 09:58:59 AM »
Survival evolution mode is almost here. Check out "Botsareus's vision" on wiki. I am working on replacing all controllers with a simple restart program and all other code internal. So you do not have to read trough all that shizam:

I am using 'reintroduction' to evolve a robot vs a non mutating version of itself --> I see if the robot beats its unevolved self in F1 -->
If it does, replace the current robots with new one repreat steps.
If it does not, or the evolving robot simply dies, adjust the corrective pressure (part of the reintroduction algorithm)



Anther very effective method, Is add a sex repro gene, make a propastressly small simulation area, evolve it (do not forget to enable reset epigenetic memory, very important) Splice a normal repro gene back in.



One thing you must do in this type of evolution is always reset epigentic memory on mutations, there is no meta data by design. So most of your evolved robots will completely suck in a new sim.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2014, 10:20:18 AM by Botsareus »

Offline spike43884

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Re: Using Animal_Minimalis as a veggie?
« Reply #3 on: October 30, 2014, 03:03:47 PM »
Just throw some overcrowding rules at animal_minimalis
Alternatively, if you want to give ultra selective pressure from a non-infinite source thing, then use generic veggies, and before starting cycle 2 just put aggressive dwarfs at all but 1 of the food sources, then to effectively succeed they must eliminated aggressive dwarfs (which litterally, to survive just need to be in a compressed area of organisms because of theyre constant food demands...like dwarfs really :P)

I got it from a evolution sim where I threw animal_minimalis, and some OP predators, it evolved tiny, snuck past them, then got aggressive and suffocated them...I think it meant to then devolve to survive long run, but it just dies from to little energy if in empty space
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