Author Topic: Plants are too powerful  (Read 5259 times)

Offline EricL

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Plants are too powerful
« on: October 04, 2007, 01:50:47 PM »
Plants are too powerful.  I think we want a world where there are significant morphological costs to balance out the huge advantage of being able to receive free nrg from nowhere each cycle.   The time as come to do something about it.  

I know we've talked about not making this split so artificial and instead modeling some autotrophic substance bots can manufacture, which would have some gradual morphological impact proportional to amount, etc.  but I want to do something simpiler and sooner.   Here's my plan.

If you are an autotroph, you:

Can't voluntarily move.  I plan to disable .up, .dn, .sx and .dx for autotophs.  You can still be unfixed.  Battery bots can carry you around, collisions will move you.  You can move voluntarily using ties, tielength and fixing multi-bot cells like inchworm (think creeping vines), but individual cells can't move on their own.

You can't shoot -1, -3 or -6 shots.  Yes, there are picther plants and venus fly traps and such in nature that supplament their solar intake by trapping insects and such but there are none that really hunt or are venomous that I know of.  There are poisionous ones of course and that will still work but poision is passive and defensive whereas venom is active.   Even with these restrictions, there are still nasty aggressive strategies plants can employ to supplement their nrg intake - using memory shots to fix non-autotrophs that happen to pass by and wait until they die and decay into corpses, etc.

You can't tie to a non-veg.  They can tie to you and if they do, you can employee all the tricks to sharenrg in your favor, etc., but you can't initiate a tie to them.  Ties between veggies are fine.

Veggie viruses can't infect non-autotrophs and vice versa.

Now, before everybody gets all fired up, let me just point out that these restrictions can serve to drive plant evolution in a different and very interesting direction.  Up until now, it's been all about building or evolving the most agressive organism.  Kill or be killed.   But now with these restricitons, plants have to give that up.  They can't hope to compete in that way.  So, their evolution (or design) becomes all about defense, about not getting eaten or at least not getting eaten down to nothing.  They can use all that free nrg to build shell, build slime, become poisionous, evolve counter tie tactics, only become poisionous for specfic species that don't know when to stop eating, etc.  Plants will become interesting in the ways they defend.  Some will defned better than others.   Non-autotrophs will become descriminating in their plant eating habits, eating some plant species and not others.  In some cases, getting past a plants defenses may require such specialized DNA that some bots focus on this exclusivly, becoming herbavores.  In others, it may not be worth it to try to get past a plant's defenses and thus some bots may find becoming strict carnivores more appealing...
 
Anyway, this seems to me to be a simple, straight forward way to balance things out...

Okay, let fly with the comments.
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Offline MacadamiaNuts

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Plants are too powerful
« Reply #1 on: October 04, 2007, 02:25:55 PM »
I agree, though I think it's just a sim artifact.

Basically, it's very rare -altought there are a few examples at bacterian level as far as I know- that an organism can both metabolize food and energy from light. Light doesn't provide enough energy at all for something that needs to move and live fast, apparently the added complexity doesn't pay for real organisms.

Ordinary DB sims probably give too much energy to veggies. We overfed bots so veggie scarcity doesn't kill them. Also they aren't run in pond mode: moving around in a pond is a bad thing for veggies when you need to stay at top.

Maintaining veggie stuff is expensive if it isn't generating energy. It's like the solar panels, they don't pay off if they don't generate enough energy.

I would:

- Put an added cost to anything that lives as "veggie". Maybe by forcing them to pile up slowly degrading chloroplast units, like slime.

- Instead of marking a bot as "veggie", just mark it as "repopulate automatically". They wouldn't receive energy from light if they don't produce chloroplasts, nor if they got infected by a non veggie virus which removed that gene. Ideally the evosims would be run repopulating it with zerobots as food pellets, and the sim would evolve both veggies and hunters.
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Offline shvarz

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Plants are too powerful
« Reply #2 on: October 04, 2007, 02:27:41 PM »
I don't like it. The main problem is that you are thinking of plants as... plants. They can't move, they can't shoot, etc. While in the world of single-cell organisms the line between plant and non-plant is very much blurred. The same cell can do photosynthesis when light is available and hunt for food when it's dark. I'd rather we went in a different direction
1. Make light less available. Day/night cycles should become standard in sims, gradients are a good option, maybe add competition for light (in gravitational sims, veggies at top of sim getting more light than veggies at the bottom).
2. Make getting energy for free more difficult. Options: require bots to make some expensive substance before they can obtain free energy (create chlorophyll); set a low cap on the amount of energy a bot can have, forcing bots to move energy between nrg and body and fat; make energy proportional to the size of bot, inversely proportional to amounts of shell and slime.
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Offline Numsgil

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Plants are too powerful
« Reply #3 on: October 04, 2007, 07:02:51 PM »
I'm with shvarz on this.  Plants in the macroscopic world don't move because they never evolved the mechanisms to, not because there's something intrinsic that forces you to stay still if you photosynthesize.  Ideally we'd just move to differentiating substances, but that's not all that backward compatible.

I would pose a simple half-way point to totally redesigning substances to include chloroplasts: have any bot labeled as a veggy be hugely big.  Have body increase the volume of a bot more aggressively if they're a bot, by quite a bit.  Like make a veggy 10x the size of a bot at 1000 body each.

Drag (there should probably be some default drag, too) would then cause veggies to move very little.  It also allows bots to hide in large veggy forests, since a veggy is likely to cover pretty much all the eyes of a bot when it gets close to it.

Other options include the same but with mass (would help limit motion if there's no drag, but doesn't really allow the whole veggy forest idea), or maybe making it so bots need to absorb some "nutrients" from an area of the sim to photosynthesize, ie: lay down roots, ie: remain fixed.  Not much of a fan of either idea, though.

Lastly, if we could implement some simple raycasting for gradient pond mode, that would be awesome.  You wouldn't need reflection or refraction, just cast several rays from the top of the sim down, losing nrg as they pass through bots and empty space (more so when they pass through bots).

I don't think the CPU hit would be all that large.  Probably on par with shots.

Offline Peter

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Plants are too powerful
« Reply #4 on: November 15, 2007, 03:04:55 PM »
I am(the third in a row ) that is against taking everything away from plants.

Could there be something done that could make the line between veggies and 'normal' more blurier. To make some bots act like a mixotroph.

Like a bot can in it's evolution choose for it's final purpose. Veggie or bot.

Simply a bot  that choses for more veggielike. Has to pay for chloroplasts and has to got a certain-body level to get all chloroplasts to work. And make chloroplasts the bot heavier or something, just to kill off movement. Or just have to get a big body for the chloroplasts to work.

A standard cost for beginning to create chlorplasts. Gotta pay for that special organel. Just to take care not every bot in becoming semi-veggie to retrieve some energie and to get most bots into veggie or fighting bot.

That way evolution will hopefully go to
Veggie= big, low/no movement. Can defent itself, but no going to kill off other bots.

Simple said, proposition is
Get off the choise of veggie in the beginning in the sim, could become atvantely a choice of whith bot it repops if the number of bots using choroplasts is too low.

Bot choosing for veggie pay for choroplasts and pay a cost if they ever want to create choroplasts.


Okay, now is the time you guys tell me what's wrong with this idea
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Offline Jez

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Plants are too powerful
« Reply #5 on: November 16, 2007, 01:59:05 PM »
Agree with the title of post, cautious about how to go about it as re. Shvarz's comment.

Production of chloroplasts as cost, size (or number of chloroplasts) related to energy received? Chloroplast needs a certain volume of body limiting max chloroplast per bot maybe...

If you extend that then any ability needs a volume to exist and so one bot with one ability needs to get bigger before getting another ability??
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Offline rsucoop

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Plants are too powerful
« Reply #6 on: February 02, 2008, 12:37:33 PM »
Perhaps the plants can suffer when the sun goes down unless they have some sort of command to sae energy and shut down when the sun goes down. Then when the sun returns, the plants can recieve energy through photosynthesis.

This would also mean that larger plants gathered more energy, but would in the end have to spend more to stay alive.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2008, 12:38:08 PM by rsucoop »

Offline Numsgil

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Plants are too powerful
« Reply #7 on: February 02, 2008, 12:52:03 PM »
But that assumes that all simulations are using the sun.  Most "default" sims have a constant light level.

BretLittle

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Re: Plants are too powerful
« Reply #8 on: February 21, 2014, 12:06:53 AM »
Plants are too powerful.  I think we want a world where there are significant morphological costs to balance out the huge advantage of being able to receive free nrg from nowhere each cycle.   The time as come to do something about it. 

I know we've talked about not making this split so artificial and instead modeling some autotrophic substance bots can manufacture, which would have some gradual morphological impact proportional to amount, etc.  but I want to do something simpiler and sooner.   Here's my plan.

If you are an autotroph, you:

Can't voluntarily move.  I plan to disable .up, .dn, .sx and .dx for autotophs.  You can still be unfixed.  Battery bots can carry you around, collisions will move you.  You can move voluntarily using ties, tielength and fixing multi-bot cells like inchworm (think creeping vines), but individual cells can't move on their own.

You can't shoot -1, -3 or -6 shots.  Yes, there are picther plants and venus fly traps and such in nature that supplament their solar panels intake by trapping insects and such but there are none that really hunt or are venomous that I know of.  There are poisionous ones of course and that will still work but poision is passive and defensive whereas venom is active.   Even with these restrictions, there are still nasty aggressive strategies plants can employ to supplement their nrg intake - using memory shots to fix non-autotrophs that happen to pass by and wait until they die and decay into corpses, etc.

You can't tie to a non-veg.  They can tie to you and if they do, you can employee all the tricks to sharenrg in your favor, etc., but you can't initiate a tie to them.  Ties between veggies are fine.

Veggie viruses can't infect non-autotrophs and vice versa.


If you ask MysticalDumpling, he will tell you that the system described above is now obsolete, loser

Now, before everybody gets all fired up, let me just point out that these restrictions can serve to drive plant evolution in a different and very interesting direction.  Up until now, it's been all about building or evolving the most agressive organism.  Kill or be killed.   But now with these restricitons, plants have to give that up.  They can't hope to compete in that way.  So, their evolution (or design) becomes all about defense, about not getting eaten or at least not getting eaten down to nothing.  They can use all that free nrg to build shell, build slime, become poisionous, evolve counter tie tactics, only become poisionous for specfic species that don't know when to stop eating, etc.  Plants will become interesting in the ways they defend.  Some will defned better than others.   Non-autotrophs will become descriminating in their plant eating habits, eating some plant species and not others.  In some cases, getting past a plants defenses may require such specialized DNA that some bots focus on this exclusivly, becoming herbavores.  In others, it may not be worth it to try to get past a plant's defenses and thus some bots may find becoming strict carnivores more appealing...
 
Anyway, this seems to me to be a simple, straight forward way to balance things out...

Okay, let fly with the comments.
You have mentioned correct information about the plants..I do agree with you as these plants are really very powerful.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2014, 12:09:16 PM by Botsareus »

Offline Testlund

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Re: Plants are too powerful
« Reply #9 on: February 21, 2014, 07:46:06 AM »
With the default settings, yes. Set Veggy Energy to 1 and Chloroplast Cost to 1. Use day/night cycles or set the sun to go down when energy reaches a certain level. Set aging cost to increase, something like 0.00008. Then you may need to use a large sim or multiple instances connected with teleporters to prevent all veggies from getting eaten.  :)
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Offline Numsgil

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Re: Plants are too powerful
« Reply #10 on: February 21, 2014, 12:35:04 PM »
Believe it or not that's a very clever spam bot. :/ (BretLittle, not Eric :P)

Offline Botsareus

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Re: Plants are too powerful
« Reply #11 on: February 21, 2014, 12:49:56 PM »
Holy sh*** we need a guy like that working for us... That is some good AI right there.

Offline MysticalDumpling

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Re: Plants are too powerful
« Reply #12 on: March 01, 2014, 09:55:09 AM »
Quote
If you ask MysticalDumpling, he will tell you that the system described above is now obsolete, loser
Stupid spam bot  >:( Eric's suggestion IS obsolete now, however. Chloroplast costs and energy gains just need to be set to Testlund's suggestion, or implement my free-radical idea.

To być albo nie być, oto jest ze pytanie