Topics

271

Specialization, Metabolism, Digestions and Env Grid / Built-in Enzyme Regulation

« on: March 23, 2005, 05:27:50 PM »

So far all I can find is allosteric regulation, but there are others.  Here's a way to introduce enzyme regulation to the enzymes themselves.  Any system that works like this should be overridable by the DNA for a certain nominal cost.

All enzyme complexes are built of activation sites.  We already (hopefully) understand how this works.  On top of this, we can add regulatory sites.  These are part of the enzyme complex in exactly the same way activation sites are, as bit patterns.

However, for this one the bit pattern has some extras.  One each side of it the 3 bits that used to code for efficiency now code for threshold values.  If the amount of stuff in the cell is above or below (I'm not sure yet) this threshold it turns the enzyme complex off.

I'm still working on the details of how it would work, but this is the skeleton of it.  This would help remove some regulation from the DNA when the DNA doesn't want to bother.

272

Off Topic / Numsgil's off to Illinois

« on: March 18, 2005, 03:43:34 PM »

Off on springbreak to Nauvoo (don't worry if you never heard of it) Illionois.  Won't be back online till Tuesday.

Solve all the problems while I'm gone.

273

Off Topic / Detergents that kill 99.99% of germs

« on: March 17, 2005, 12:55:54 PM »

Have any of you seen the commercials for the soaps that kill 99.99% of bacteria?  Does anyone else think they're almost criminally irresponsible?

I mean, they kill all but a handful of germs.  Why does that .01% survive?  Probably because they're immune in some way.

 :blink: Where have we seen this before?  Oh yeah, penicillin!  HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING?

60 years from now hospitals will be battling to stay anaseptic.  Basic handwashing soap will either be innefective or tighly regulated (I'm sorry Mrs. Jones, but #1 doesn't need soap.).

All because germ-o-phobic parents are scared of a few surface germs.  MADNESS!

274

Specialization, Metabolism, Digestions and Env Grid / Darwinbots enzyme system

« on: March 16, 2005, 12:07:58 PM »

Here it is, written into a document.  Lucky you.

Note that this is different from the system to specialize in actions like shooting and moving, etc.  Related, but seperate.

275

Suggestions / Currents

« on: March 15, 2005, 04:13:23 PM »

Thought about this while thinking of ways to simulate blood vessels.

Using the E grid, we define velocities that represent currents.  When a bot is in a grid, the force of friction on it is determined by the difference in the bots velocity and the grid square's and the density of the square.

Also, these currents effect the rate of diffusion between high and low concentrations.  A high concentration won't diffuse into a low concentration if it's headed in the opposite direction.

ie:

1.2.3 = Egrid
>.>.^  = vectors
1.6.3 = concentrations

When egrid 1 diffuses, it does so predominantly towards 2, even though 2 has a higher concentration.  grid 2 diffuses primarily into grid 3, and not at all into grid 1, even though grid 1 has much lower concentrations.

Just an idea, I'm not sure how well it'd all work.  Still some issues to work out.

276

Off Topic / Speed Increase in 3.0?

« on: March 15, 2005, 01:54:18 PM »

Has anyone who's tried out the buggy version of 3.0 that uses different eye codes noticed a speed increase?

You know you have that version if your old bots don't seem to turn or fire at the correct distances anymore.  Or if you got your version from me in the last week or so.

I was running a simulation, and managed to get something like 200 cycles/sec at 100 bots with the display turned off.  'Wow' is about all I could say.  Before I think I got around 30-50 cycles/sec.

I spent about a week to a week and a half working on speeding up the program.  It's really smoking now, but I need to know if anyone else has noticed or if all I did was speed it up on my computer.

277

Biology / Evolution -> Species

« on: March 15, 2005, 01:12:57 PM »

Found this interesting article on evolution and speciation.  Might be difficult for some non-native English speakers, but worth a look anyway.

278

Tips and Tricks / Order of Actions

« on: March 14, 2005, 01:43:55 PM »

This will help everyone when writing bots.
If something is unclear, tell me and I'll look it up more specifically.

1.  Readtie is set, and reads tie information into Trefs
2.  delgene happens
3a. Communication using ties occurs.
3b. Ties are updated (that is, things like sharenrg, deleting ties, and feeding through ties.  Does not include firing ties though)
4a. The bot turns.
4b. Position is updated (things like accelerations, velocity, colisions, etc.  Also updates the eye positions)
5.  Slime and shell are made.
6.  Shoot commands occur
7.  Viruses are shot
8.  Boyancy is set
9.  storing body, venom, and poison
10. feeding from body
11. Firing of ties.
12. reproducing
13. Death

Note that all of this happens after the DNA is executed.  The DNA effects the memory locations for commands, and only after all the DNA executes do the above happen.

279

Off Topic / Damn, that was close

« on: March 13, 2005, 07:15:28 AM »

I was trying to find a bug in my windows installation on drive D.  Whenever I explored C it took something like 80 seconds to find it.

Drive C hasn't had a windows installation on it for over a year.  It's mostly just where I install crap.  So I deleted everything in the root of my C drive.

That seemed to fix the problem, so I was happy.  Then I restarted an hour later...

My computer wouldn't load up at all.  Said something about NTFLS not found, or some either equally inane acronym.

Oh no!  I broke my computer!

5 hours later I have to load up with a boot disk.  Thank goodness no data was lost.  Have no idea how to access my NTFS partition though...

Thank goodness I have a laptop and my roommate's computer.

280

Off Topic / Linking to specific posts

« on: March 13, 2005, 03:17:29 AM »

Hey, found this for how to link to a post within a thread:

See that little underlined word above all the posts called 'Posted'?  As in Posted on Date?

Click on that.

281

Bot Tavern / Spaniard Conquistador

« on: March 12, 2005, 06:03:43 AM »

This is a modified version of Animal Minimalis I posted.  Climbs 2/3's the way through F1! (Obviously trounces SB right now).

Uses poison and a self replicating virus that blinds bots that aren't immune to it.  Hence why it's called a spanish conquistador (the spaniards killed alot of Aztecs with small pox for the history illeterate).

The self replicating virus is really the shining point.  The rest of it is pretty standard.  You'll need a working version of 3.0 AKA 2.36 because it uses the value 0 store as free feature and the *.thisgene for the virus.  If you don't have it, sned me an email with a large enough inbox and I'll send you a version of it to play with.

Find it in the beastiary as "Spanish Conquistador (SB) 0.8" here.  When I get the version done I'll post it as 1.0 and we can enter it in the leagues  :boing:

282

Short bots / Spanish Conquistador (6G)(Numsgil)-12.05.05

« on: March 12, 2005, 06:03:10 AM »

Code: [Select]

'Spanish Conquistador
'uses poison and viruses, yikes!
'version 1.0

def stopper 999
def timer 998
def incme 997
def stopshoot 990

'gene 1
cond
start
89
*.stopper abs 1 ceil -1 mult 1 add
.stopper mult store

.stopper
*.memloc abs 1 ceil -1 mult 1 add
.memloc mult store

.shoot *.ploc dup div -1 mult 1 add .ploc mult store

*.tiepres *.numties 1 ceil -1 mult 1 add .deltie mult store

*.robage 1 ceil -1 mult 1 add .tie mult inc

'*.shell 40 div -1 mult .mkshell store

20
*.shflav -6 sub abs 1 ceil -1 mult 1 add
.mkshell mult store

*.fixed -1 mult 1 add *.fixed .fixpos mult store

100 *.nrg 2500 sub sgn 0 ceil -1 mult .fdbody mult store
stop

'gene 2
cond
*.robage 40 >
*.refage 2 >
*.eye5 0 >
89 *.memval !=
start
-6 .shoot store
-8 .shootval store
*.refveldx .dx store
*.refvelup 30 add .up store
stop

'gene 3
cond
*.robage 40 >
*.refage 2 >
*.eye5 50 >
89 *.memval !=
start
*.refvelup .up store
*.eye6 *.eye4 sub .aimdx store
stop

'gene 4
cond
*.eye5 0 =
*.eye5 0 >
89 *.memval = and
or
start
314 rnd .aimdx store
stop

'gene 5
'strbody and reproduce and poison
cond
*.nrg 3000 >
start
100
*.body 20000 sub sgn -1 mult 0 floor .strbody mult store
10
*.nrg 20000 sub sgn 0 floor .repro mult store


'poison
1000 *.poison sub
*.poison 1000 sub 10 div sgn -1 mult 0 floor .strpoison mult
store

'ploc
.shoot
*.ploc 1 sub sgn -1 mult 0 floor .ploc mult
store

'slime
200 *.slime sub 10 div 0 floor 200 ceil .mkslime store
stop

'gene 6
'viruses.  Self replicating.  And in SG league.  Golly!
cond
start
'self propogation code
*.thisgene
1000

*.vtimer 1 ceil -1 mult 1 add 998 store

*998 .vshoot mult store
*998 .mkvirus mult store

'malicous code
100 rnd
20 rnd
1256 rnd

*.stopper 89 sub abs 1 ceil 0 floor 998 store '1 if right, 0 else

*998 .setaim mult store
*998 .fdbody mult store
*998 .repro mult store
stop
end

283

Suggestions / More than single cycle genes

« on: March 12, 2005, 04:22:09 AM »

Trying to make MB's you realize how hard it is to coordinate actions that take more than one cycle to finish.

So a waitcycle command would be cool to have.  Then we could have something like:

cond
*.robage 0 =
start
628 .aimdx store
1 waitcycle
.tie inc
1 waitcycle
.deltie inc
stop

In addition, we'd need a *.active sysvar that works similar to *.thisgene in that it changes after every gene.  *.active would store 1 if the gene is active, 0 otherwise, so you could do something like:

cond
*.active 1 !=
*.nrg 20000 >
start
20 .repro store
50 waitcycle
stop

to limit your bot from reproducing more than once every 50 cycles.

This works much smoother with the simultaneous DNA execution I was talking about in the other thread.

284

Off Topic / 3D Visual Basic Programming

« on: March 12, 2005, 12:42:20 AM »

I thought that I'd look into working on my old space game again once 3.0 is out and reasonably stable.

In my space game, I need a system for zooming around the universe of known stars easily.

A program I found that does this very well is Celestia.  I haven't tried to look at the source code yet for it though (yuck!  there's like a trillion files).

I plan to use VB since it allows for faster development, which is what I'm really after, and most of my program isn't time sensitive at all anyway.  Mostly menu driven.

I found this sample OpenGL space progam for VB.  Looks promising.

Anyone look into 3D programming in VB?  Anyone want to give it a look?

285

Suggestions / Simoltaneous DNA execution

« on: March 11, 2005, 06:40:20 AM »

A couple of ideas I've had have been short circuited because of the linear nature of DNA in DB.  Gene 1 affects the cell.  Then gene 2 affects the cell.  That's not how real DNA works.  In real DNA gene 1 and gene 2 happen at the same time.

So what if, when a gene effects the cell, it's put into a action list.  After the DNA has executed, the action list is applied to the cell.  Then each gene would seem to be executing at the same time.

If two actions contradict (-6 .shoot store and -1 .shoot store) then we can either:
1. average the values -or-
2. the more numerous command wins (2 -6's override the one -1) -or-
3. some commands take precedance over others.  (-6 takes precedence over -1.)
4. one of the actions is randomly chosen (whichever gene managed to get its signals to the appropriate mechanism first).

We could even make the action sensitive to the command.  Maybe shooting figures out the most numerous while turning averages the values.

There are some subtle implications if we do this.  Alot of things would need to be worked out.  But it would theoretically be the first step in a number of complex additons, such as diploid (or X ploid) DNA and a more complex sexual reproduction.