Author Topic: A Family 2  (Read 5640 times)

Offline Endy

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A Family 2
« on: August 26, 2005, 05:06:48 AM »
Got A Fam2 posted. It's pretty cool since it only selects from a range of values for deciding it's actions. It's population seems to sit relativly low but it doesn't seem to decend into permanent c-botism like normal.

The bots randomly pick on Cy 0 = the general values used for motion, turning, reproduction levels, and repro %. After the initial population reduction the remaining decendents begin to inc/dec their epigenetic values in respect to the other's values.

The conditions for firing are fairly good at preventing Canni's but they still occasionally crop up, some using turns to deliberatly cause their shots to go wide and hit their own kin. The difference is that this doesn't affect all the bots equally since they are all using different values, the others can then pick up on these values and adjust their own accordingly. So far the population has gone through several cycles of Friendlies and Cannibots.

Pretty nice bot and extremly adaptable to a variety of enviroments since the values are not strictly fixed. Tried to make it relativly simple to see what evolution does wtih it.

Weird seeing evolution of a sort take place in the memory of the bots, as the epigenetic locations change based on external conditions seen by the whole species.

Offline Numsgil

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A Family 2
« Reply #1 on: August 26, 2005, 08:58:56 AM »
It's sort of like the evolution of mammal groups.  Elephants, for example, have some complex behavioral customs that must be learned.  That's why Elephants raised in captivity are having a hard go at it.

So it makes you wonder if perhaps that epigenetic cultural evolution is what makes mammals so adaptible.

Offline Botsareus

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A Family 2
« Reply #2 on: August 26, 2005, 12:01:07 PM »
I was actualy planning to make a simuler bot some day, I will deffinatly have a look. It's very cool.

Offline Endy

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A Family 2
« Reply #3 on: August 27, 2005, 06:51:40 PM »
Been playing with Fam2, it seems pretty stable for long runs, I had one manage over 700,000 cys before finally dying out seemingly more from my own coding than the canni's that poped up. I think waste buildup may be playing a benneficial role here also, normally waste wouldn't affect the bots dna, but since these rely so heavily on memlocs they can be wiped out by a replaced value.

I'm going to work on improving their dna somewhat, add better hunting genes, and maybe some deffensive genes.

Yeah, I've been looking into epigenetics(Lamarkian Evolution) a bit myself. It's kind of interesting to note that animals utilize this at a level so basic, it actually removes their ability to, for the most part, assexually reproduce.

Here's wikipedias version
Imprinting/Epigenetic

I'm not sure exactly what this bot's form of evolution could be called, my best guess would be it's a mixture of the two a sort of Darwinism/Lamarkian evolution types. Seems pretty good in allowing more variety in the bots, whatever it's called.

Offline Numsgil

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A Family 2
« Reply #4 on: August 27, 2005, 07:55:45 PM »
I read an article a few years ago (I've always been interested in ALife) about how for many situations Lamarckian-esque evolution, although not technically following the natural world, provides faster results.

Which makes sense after all.  So it's definately a promissing path to go down in bot research.  I wonder how much you could get the bots to use memory locations for everything...

I know Bots was working on memory pointers for a while.  Things like *50 *51 store.



Do you think I should make waste a mutagen?  So building up waste causes more mutations?  That would be cool, and I'd be all for it.  Sort of random, but your post made me think of it.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2005, 07:55:55 PM by Numsgil »

Offline Endy

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A Family 2
« Reply #5 on: August 28, 2005, 03:37:49 AM »
Yeah I think that'd be a good idea, maybe also charge the bots a cost in nrg based on how much poisons(waste) they're carrying around. This would spur bots to have to repro so as to remain alive or at least get rid of the waste occasionally.

I would like some sort of memory pointer, although I think the best way to handle it would be just to add some sort of * readback command. You could then just str the numbers like normal and then apply the readback whenever necessary.

Should be great for mutations and for designed bots by allowing changing rdbk locations during the bot's lifetime. Would also probably shorten down on required coding since rdbks would be treated no differently than a storeloc.

Umm...real creatures do use alot epigenetics(all mamals), Presumably it's better to hard code most of it but have epigenetics to allow more variety using the same basic dna. It's part of the reason all of our cells can share the same initial dna but have radically different forms that they pass on to their decendents.

The wikepedia article talks about this pretty well. Humans normally must have two parents because the function of a gene changes based on the parent it came from. This is why cloning is so difficult, clones only have one parent so don't receive the proper epigenetic information. I'm guessing here but it seems animals were/are able to do better based on how much information they can compact together.

In DB we could rig something to possibly work with a *.dad and *.mom reference or something similar since there would be no defined sexes. This could tell the bots which parent a gene came from and they could act differently accordingly.

Offline spike43884

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Re: A Family 2
« Reply #6 on: December 22, 2014, 02:29:40 PM »
I'd love someone to post the DNA for this (or a link to it) hopefully not in inline conditioning...
Im obsessed with swarmbots (no, not multibots. Swarmbots)
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