Messages

46

Biology / Spores?

« on: August 29, 2006, 08:56:54 AM »

I take it that shell and slime can be used at the same time? Are there any disadvantages to using them together now?

yes they can and no there isn't

Remember that slime gradually goes away though. It gets dissolved into the surroundings. And shots can diminish the shell barrier.

47

Off Topic / Happy Birthday Numsgil

« on: August 24, 2006, 11:49:48 AM »

Happy birthday Num      

Now what to do for a gift??  

After that lovely Bidet (B'Day   ) from last year I really can't decide.

48

Off Topic / Got an email from Prinsesse Yasmine!

« on: August 18, 2006, 08:48:23 AM »

Worse than spammers.  

This is obvious Phishing.

They want to get your personal details so they can steal your identity. The one about depositing money in your bank account is the most common scam though it is usually some persecuted rich person from Africa rather than a Princess. I get 3 or 4 of these a year these days

49

Off Topic / Happy Birthday Endy

« on: August 16, 2006, 08:41:06 AM »

Happy birthday Endy

       

50

Suggestions / Sexual Reproduction Focus Group

« on: August 11, 2006, 09:17:59 AM »

By the way, could anybody tell me what's so wrong with .sexrepro?

Nothing really (in concept) It just doesn't seem to work.  
Also it does not give either parent a real choice in the who the other one will be as it takes the DNA of the nearest bot in physical space to combine with its own.

51

Suggestions / Sexual Reproduction Focus Group

« on: August 09, 2006, 12:17:48 PM »

We don't know of any non-eukaryotic life that sexually reproduces

We don't know of any non-organic life form period.
Who knows how they will reproduce if we ever discover them?

The only example we have is real life having real sex.

Ha! limiting ourselves to real life is boring.  
I want to go way beyond what real life can do. I want to explore fantasy worlds as well as real ones.

Certainly sperms (real life ones) are slow and fragile when they move under their own power but they can be packaged up and ejected with considerable force over a short distance. Shots do the same thing. They die too if they don't hit something within a reasonable time frame.

Besides, if my DarwinBots are inorganic, electrical lifeforms then a shot containing a digital code is totally in-keeping with the reality of the sim. It lives as long as it has enough electrical power to maintain it and if it hits a taget during its limited lifespan then it transfers its pattern to whatever it hits.

Shots have no natural analog really, you just have to accept them as a throwback to Darwinbots's idealogical predecessor

I have been pointing that out for years. There are a bunch of things in DB that have no natural analog. Pretty much all the eye based sensory inputs (apart from distance) would fall into that catagory too.

I don't think we should really concern ourselves with making DBs match real life except where that gives us the best chance of something working right. My philosophy is to give them as many avenues as possible to do whatever they need do and let them choose how to do it themselves. Realistic? Not realistic? Doesn't make a lot of difference to me.


Incidentally, some pretty weird stuff happens in real life too.
In some fish such, as guppys and a few other live bearers, the female can carry a package of sperm for a couple of years and use it to fertilise mamy many batches of young. How do they keep the fragile sperm alive? I have no idea. I expect somebody does though. I just never bothered to look for the info.  

52

Suggestions / Sexual Reproduction Focus Group

« on: August 09, 2006, 08:49:46 AM »

If bots are inorganic, sexual reproduction has no analog and we're back to square one.

What would make you think that?
There is no reason why inorganic life shouldn't reproduce sexually.

If we start departing too much, I think we're less likely to stumble on the correct combination that makes sexual reproduction more than a curiosity.

Agreed but I don't see any problem with using shots as sperm. It is completely analogous to many higher order aquatic organisms. If your only issue is one of scale of the shots then you are artificially injecting a problem that isn't really there by making assumptions about the nature/size of DarwinBots. By this reasoning we should probably scap viruses too.

The exact nature of the beasts has always been completely open so that they are whatever any one user wants them to be. And that's the way they should stay.
To me they are sometimes little machines and at other times they might be fish in a pond. DarwinBots are undefined so we can't really force them into non-existent niches by insisting on adherence to a reality that in many cases can't really apply.

53

Suggestions / Sexual Reproduction Focus Group

« on: August 08, 2006, 09:12:22 AM »

What if we take the bots to be inorganic or electrical lifeforms with no real analogies to actual biological lifeforms (that we know of) whatsoever?

That is actually the way I think of them mostly. It make things a lot easier to get a handle on if you don't need to completely mirror known natural stuff.

Besides, if a virus can hold a portion or all of a robot's dna then a sperm the same size could also do it.

54

DNA - General / Chameleon genes

« on: August 07, 2006, 12:47:07 PM »

Yes I believe that is how it works.

It's been a long long time since I tinkered with that bit of code. As I recall I had a hell of a lot of trouble trying to get it to work on one cycel. The problem is that all sysvar senses are loaded at the beginning of the cycle, before the DNA is parsed in the main loop so by the time the main loop knows it has to look for a value in a specific memory location, it's too late to do so immediately so it has to do it next itme around.

You should be able to do it in 3 steps tho instead of 4. You can change the value in .memloc on the same cycle that you read the value in the old memory location. Might save you a bit of time.

55

F2 bots / Blue on Blue (F2)(Jez)-05.08.06

« on: August 07, 2006, 10:11:21 AM »

Okey Dokey. There's no rule against going in both leagues if the bot makes the cut. I will run them both in both leagues when I get a chance to. Might be a while as I just got back from vacation and have a bunch of work to catch up on.

56

Suggestions / Sexual Reproduction Focus Group

« on: August 07, 2006, 10:09:24 AM »

so how would we initiate the mixing?

In the rather primitive .sexrepro command that has been knocking about in BD since carlo coded it way back, a bot simply takes the DNA of the nearest (physically) bot and splices it with its own.
That doesn't seem right.
I think we could use some kind of modified shot as a sperm cell. it would basically contain a link back to the entire DNA of its originator then each bot could have a kind of mirror DNA slot where recieved sperm could be stored until used. Possibly an incoming sperm shot could displace the existing reference DNA.

Another option would be to do a similar thing via ties. maybe the competing males could grab the females with ties and inject her with their sperm (bit like mating squids). The point that all the bots are most likely heraphrodites will just serve to make this more interesting and a whole lot more confusing  

Any other ideas?

57

DNA - General / Chameleon genes

« on: August 07, 2006, 09:48:49 AM »

I can't see amy obvious reasopn why it shouldn't work.

Have you tried stepping it through with the console?

58

F2 bots / Blue on Blue (F2)(Jez)-05.08.06

« on: August 07, 2006, 09:45:21 AM »

Is this bot for F2?

It says enter into F1 but it looks like it is F2 compatible as well.

59

DNA - General / Chameleon genes

« on: August 07, 2006, 09:23:19 AM »

I don't see any place in the genes above where you actually stored the value in .reqmeloc into a memory location

Basically, in order to read .memval you have to first store a value into .memloc

if you want to find a value of 8741 in memory location 604, you need something like...

Code: [Select]

cond
start
  604 .memloc store
stop

cond
  *.memval 8741 =
start
  'do whatever you want
stop

60

Bug reports / body and mass

« on: July 28, 2006, 08:51:45 AM »

so both nrg and body must be greater than something ...
could you explain just what value they are being compared to?
just > 60 and >61

*60 and *61 are both memory locations that store values used as a threshold for reproduction.
As the bot gets older they are incremented so that a young bot reproduces quite quickly but as they age they get bigger and stronger.

I think Eric is missing the point when he says that ALL older bots will work in 2.4.
Some of the old ones that don't use body controls barely work in pre-2.4 when compared to the ones that manage their own body successfully.
IMO all modern bots need to use some sort of *.body conditional if they want to compete.