coexistence

[Numsgil]

Glad to see you're still running simulations!  Looks like you're getting some reasonable simulation speed, at least.  Keep us posted.

[hdggDalton]

Oh yeah i'm still running the simulation. i'm a bit pressed for time right now so i think i'll post more later, but an extremely interesting development is that some of the bots became plants, and actually succeeded at sustaining a population long term. There had been some new plant species before this, one of the most notable was in the top left which eventually died out, this one is in the top right corner and it's really weird. It's like the way it produces chloroplasts is only when it gets shot by something. Its reproduction is a bit erratic and filled with cannibalism so it spreads very slowly. But something else extremely interesting is that there's some kind of sentinel/guardian subspecies that somehow appropriated the genes for reproduction and used it to continually shoot around itself in a circle. These guys have maximum energy and body and frequently 1 shot any "normal" bots dumb enough to come near them. Something even more interesting about these guardians is that since the code for reproduction has a trigger to see if they have enough energy, they only shoot when they have enough energy. So this leads to the super cool phenomenon in which when it's daytime, they start getting energy from the sun and usually all of them are active and shooting, but when it's nighttime, they eventually fall below the energy threshold and stop shooting to conserve their energy

The term guardian may be a misnomer since they'll happily shoot their plant brethren with no discrimination if they're close enough. But so far they've been slowly spreading and surviving so it must be working for them

[hdggDalton]

So, i decided to make the simulation tougher to survive in the hopes of making the bots evolve out of pressure. I doubled the base cost of living per cycle from 1 energy to 2 energy, and i also decreased how much energy plants get from the sun. It's been a while so those weird/interesting plant bots are long gone unfortunately. I squeezed them to extinction by decreasing energy from the sun as i mentioned before because their shots were causing a huge amount of lag.

I also wanted to shake up the strategies that the bots used. Because the vast majority of them just stayed still, only moving when they see a nearby bot or plant, I wanted to both punish this strategy (by doubling the cost of living without doing anything) and encourage new strategies that involve more movement by halving the movement cost. So far it seems that by raising the energy cost of living for everyone, it has made all of the bots more hostile and cannibalistic, and they seem to be better at actually hitting their shots too. I guess because there's now even more selection for bots that can gain energy not only from plants but also from other bots. Other than that, they don't seem to have developed any new movement strategies yet. The closest I've seen are the various deleterious negative mutations that just make the bot spin around in circles until it dies, which doesn't work because it doesn't achieve much more than just staying in place and wastes a bunch of energy, and also it completely denies the bot any opportunity to make use of leftover drifting velocity - that's a major source of movement for most bots, especially really really small bots with very little body which can just drift for a good distance on just leftover velocity from eating or chasing a bot. Others make the bot run in a straight line until getting stuck on a shape or the map corner (there's no wrap around) and then dying.

An interesting trend i noticed is that since i started the simulation this morning (I made the sweeping changes a few days earlier), I didn't change any settings but the size of the bot population is very slightly trending up, and the total energy of the bot population is very slightly trending down. My guess is that because the bots have become more fighty, they're collectively wasting more energy through stray body and energy shots, and the cost of shots and movement. For the population, I guess that the bots changed their reproduction threshold to be lower, so they make more children, but each getting slightly less energy.

Here's the best bot, 28 descendants out of a population of 705. So you can see it's far from being dominated by one particular lineage or species

Code: [Select]


 cond
 *.refshoot *.refveldn *.eye8 !=
 >=
 start
 *159 13991 *.myshoot 313 4696 *.myshoot addstore
 addstore
 28820 *.chlr *.edge store
 | 4696 *.myshoot addstore
 .eye8dir store

''''''''''''''''''''''''  Gene:  1 Ends at position  25  '''''''''''''''''''''''
''''''''''''''''''''''''  Gene:  2 Begins at position  26  '''''''''''''''''''''''
 start
 *.eye5 11 >=
 .tout2 store
 *.fixed -6 .shoot store
 532 *.xpos *.hit store
 *.refdx 336 xor
 5 ++ addstore
 *.nrg 23435 >
 pow 550 *.in6 *.xpos store
 .repro store
''''''''''''''''''''''''  Gene:  2 Ends at position  55  '''''''''''''''''''''''


[hdggDalton]

Very cool thing about the graphs: today i increased the cost of living again from 2 to 3 energy per cycle, but i also increased the energy from the sun from 20 to 30 energy. It made the graphs more volatile and varied:

[hdggDalton]

Weirdly, there's a moderately strong upwards trend in the bot population, but all the other things like average energy, average age, and total energy stayed the same. This means the bots must be becoming better adapted to the harsh conditions i've imposed upon them