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Metabolism

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Endy:
I was thinking that the reactions for plants and animals could produce different types of waste this way they couldn't feed from their own waste. We could probably just include waste types, as enzymes specified by the enzymes used initially to feed. Should make many more niches possible for the system as a whole.

Numsgil:
The way the system described in the paper worked, there were many metabolites that were excreted as waste.  With a little tweaking I'm sure we could create a stable cycle between autotrophs and heterotrophs.

d-EVO:
just an idea

maby add anothere factore like mineral and salt deposits.
plants will grow on them and depending on how much contact they make with the diposit and how much sunlight they recieve. they produce energy.
this will encorage plants to make "roots" in the soil and branches above for both minerals and sunlight.
as well as creating a more dinamic environment encoraging complex behavior to evolve. eg. tuneling ant bots.

plants cant make energy from sun alone. it simple stores the suns energy into molicules "nrg" which can be accesed by the plant or eaten by herbivores.

ikke:
Great minds think alike. Some time ago in a discussion on the simplicity of DB ecology I launched the idea of shapes having their own physics. Basically cost, movement type etc , mutation rate are a parameter of the shapes in the sim, not of the sim itself. Yesterday I was thinking that with this construct ion you can also expand the difference between plants and animals. If a shape has a concentration of nutrients and if the defining characteristic of plants is they can convert nutrients and energy into body by means of surface exposure to nutrients and energy we can do all sorts of fun stuff.
Water: shape with nutrients & energy both available. Plants possible
Soil: shape with nutrients only, high density / movement cost, no energy. No plantgrowth
Air: shape with low density / movement cost, no nutrients, energy only. No plantgrowth
Border between soil & air: plant possible bottom half of the plant gets nutrients, top half gets  energy, the plant converts it into body.
If energy is further defined as having a direction (pond and / or shading) there is a reason to develop MB veggies with roots and leaves
Animals are defined as having the ability to convert body into energy (-6  shots, strbody )or to steal energy (-1 shots), and by doing so forsake the ability to convert nutrients & energy into body

Numsgil:
My ambitions are more temperate from 3 years ago, but I'm still playing around conceptually with this stuff.  It's tempting to implement some sort of photosynthesis metabolic pathway, and other metabolic pathways for animals, etc., but I'm also wary of making it complicated for the sake of complication.  I definitely like the idea of tunneling through shapes.  For antbots if nothing else.  Right not the bot-bot interactions are pretty rich but the bot-environment interactions are pretty weak.

Tunneling will probably work through ingestion, so I'm going to have to invent a new substance to represent what shapes are made out of.  I'm also tempted to allow for liquid shapes: essentially ponds I suppose.  The physics would be pretty cool if the bottom of the sim is liquid, and bots use buoyancy to rise and fall, and the top of the sim is more like what we have now, and bots have to fight gravity.  I'm still working through how the physics would work for a bot floating on the top of a liquid, but I think it's doable.  Anyway, those two could cover water and soil.

It's the last step that I'm hung up on.  I don't know that I like the idea of requiring water or soil or something like that for plants to photosynthesize.  It puts a real limit on the sort of sims that people can run.  And having those substances provide some sort of bonus (+25% photosynthesis) seems especially silly.  On the other hand, cycles are important for the healthy functioning of an ecosystem.  Carbon cycle, water cycle, etc.  So another idea is to require substances in addition to light to photosynthesize, and just have them ordinarily be omnipresent.

So I dunno, it's an interesting problem I'm still thinking about.

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