Code center > Suggestions
Veggie waste feeding
PurpleYouko:
--- Quote ---But if waste is a kind of food, it will always be possible for a bot to reuse its own waste as food, and thereby having a unlimited energy source, unless you make the pathways of the metabolism extremely complex and long
--- End quote ---
I don't see it that way at all
For one thing even if the bot's waste has undigested but digestable food in it then it would have to shoot itself with a waste shot before it could eat the stuff. Not too easy to accomplish.
Secondly, even if he did shoot himself then there would be a much lower proportion of food that is usable by that bot, contained in the poop. This means that after a couple of times round the loop of eat --> poop --> eat --> poop, it will cost more to feed on it than the energy that is returned.
If a shot containing food X is eaten by a specialist X-Eating bot then he will be able to use 99.9% of it. The other 1% will be converted to waste as food type Y. When he has saved up 100 waste he poops it out and a Y eating bot intercepts it. This bot uses 99% of it for energy and begins building up waste type Z etc. etc.
There is no way a bot can ever survive on its own waste.
Numsgil:
It's a simple matter of estblishing entropy in converting A to B. Waste converts to energy at a significant loss. Then even if you eat your own waste, you're not generating that much energy.
It's mathematically provable that as long as there is some loss from the waste->nrg->waste cycle, the amount of energy you can gain is finite.
PurpleYouko:
--- Quote ---I HAVE read every little bit in the sub Forum about metabolism etc., and I still have a hard time understanding the basic's of the system, and for me this you state here about enzyme slots contradicts what it says in the other threads!
--- End quote ---
Yes it does contradict other posts that I and others have made.
I was oversimplifying the concept of enzyme efficiency to explain it in easier terms.
the reality would be that enzyme would be bit patterns of varying lengths, all held in a binary string. Enzymes would be abble to overlap in such a string so that it would be very hard to program them manually.
Example.
011010110 may be defined as an enzyme that digests food X at an efficiency of 7.3%
The following string
01101011010110
Contains two such enzymes. they overlap and share several digits. If these two are present in a robot's bit pattern then its overall efficiency for converting food X to energy will be 14.6%
01101011010110
and
01101011010110
Suppose there is another enzyme that converts X to energy at 1.3% efficiency. Its pattern is
101101 (shorter = less efficient)
You can also find one of these in the bit pattern above
01101011010110
so the bot's total efficiency will be 15.9%
Make sense?
Old Henk:
--- Quote ---It's mathematically provable that as long as there is some loss from the waste->nrg->waste cycle, the amount of energy you can gain is finite.
--- End quote ---
Ok, then I'm with it :)
PY, can a bot 'see' its own enzymes?
PurpleYouko:
--- Quote ---PY, can a bot 'see' its own enzymes?
--- End quote ---
I am not quite sure which way we are going to go just yet. I would say that the enzymes would not be visible from the DNA directly. (ie. the robot cannot directly read them) However they will be visible to the programmer.
My idea is to put the enzyme bit string at the start of the robot text file a bit like the def command now. The difference is that it will be subject to mutations and will also be saved along with the robot DNA file.
I think enzymes should work behind the scenes automatically and not be directly controllable.
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