General > Biology

Viruses

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Greven:
I see you point PY, and yet again I dont.

This should be evolutions job!

Say: you run a evo sim. Some bot gets the upper hand and is totaly a killer, no other bot can beat it. Then you analyse the bot, sees that "Oh, here it takes an advantage of a flaw, and rushlessly exploit!, you change that piece of code, then you run a sim again.

Only when bots are countuailly evovled /co-evolving the "game" is optimum, or whatever.

Numsgil:
Thing is it's the battle-bot sort of stuff that attracts new people.  I found it for that reason.  Same with alot of us here.

I think DB balances the two quite well.  Neither is predominant over the other.  There's no reason it can't be interesting from both point of views.  If something is only interesting from the POV of battle-bots or for evo sims, then it probably needs to be fleshed out more.

Numsgil:

--- Quote ---The sad thing is that I can't come up with any rules that would allow making viruses and still be useful to bots :(

But I do have an idea on how to define what DNA to place into viral particle.  Whenever the program encounters .mkvirus, it looks at the sequence of 5 previous commands, say they are "1 2 > * stop".  Then it looks for exact same 5 commands downstream of .mkvirus and copies the whole stretch into the particle.  The particle has the following DNA: "1 2 > * stop -viralDNAhere - 1 2 > * stop".  If the commands are not found downstream, then no viral particle is made.

Whenver the viral particle hits a bot, then the program looks for the first 5 commands of virus in the DNA of the bot. If it finds it, then it inserts the viral DNA in that spot and duplicates the 5 commands on both sides.

So that if bots DNA used to be:

blah-blah 1 2 > * stop blah-blah

Now it will be

blah-blah 1 2 > * stop -viralDNAhere 1 2 > * stop blah-blah

If it does not find the 5 commands then virus can't infect that cell.

This system is very flexible and it allows a lot of real-life things to happen to viruses.  Like they can get stuck in DNA (if infected cell divides and mutates the second 5 commands) and then they can get re-activated.  They can pick up some bots DNA with them.  They allow cells to create "traps" for viruses, placing them outside of valid conditions.  They allow natural viral-host co-evolution.
--- End quote ---
But at the same time it becomes more difficult to program them as a weapon for the leagues...  Like they'd really only be useful against others of your same genome, wich is exactly opposite of how a weapon is supposed to work.

I think we must first define what we want viruses to be used for, then figure out the implementation.  Viruses as methods for copying genes seems the most obvious.  Viruses as methods for transporting code snipets is also possible.  I could go either way, but I think the first makes more sense.

And as far as implementation: mkvirus accepts some sort of number that presumably represents the location of the DNA to be copied into a virus.  But if viruses are flying around, the only location in the genome you can be really sure of is your own.  You're always going to be *.thisgene.  All other gene positions can change quite dramatically.

Botsareus:

--- Quote ---And as before it should be: Evo over game!
Please! I beg you Num!
--- End quote ---

Strange, people will not say this things unless: hmmm, do the new mutations sux or what?

P.S.

sorry for being of topic too.

Numsgil:

--- Quote ---Strange, people will not say this things unless: hmmm, do the new mutations sux or what?
--- End quote ---
What on Earth makes you say that?

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