Darwinbots Forum
General => Off Topic => Topic started by: Shasta on December 16, 2011, 03:44:33 AM
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Hey guys, thought some of you might be interested in this. Myself and a classmate wrote an artificial life sim in a few of days. It uses slightly modified version of Sunweaver (DNA library from DB3), and is based around a hex grid as a world. We were in a bit of a hurry, so stuff isn't very polished, it works though, for the most part. Mutation rates and costs are incredibly finicky, I would recommend keeping them low.
List of sysvars:
move ' direction to move, goes from 1-6 in order listed for the eyes below
eat ' direction to eat, goes from 1-6 in order listed for the eyes
eatval ' ammount of energy to try and eat
repro ' works like you expect, store % of energy to give to child
' eyes have a value > 0 if something is there, number correlates of type (only one type implemented)
eyeul ' up left
eyeur ' up right
eyel ' left
eyer ' right
eyedl ' down left
eyedr ' down right
focuseye ' current eye to focus for the ref and in/out commands goes in order listed above 0-5
myenergy ' current energy
mypain ' ammount of energy lost in a cycle, cant remeber if it works
mypleasure ' amount of energy gained in a cycle cant remember if it works.
myage ' current age
refenergy ' energy the bot under the focuseye has
refage ' age of the bot under the focuseyey
in1 ' in#/out# work just like in DB2, uses focuseye
in2
out1
out2
mkchlr ' # of chloroplasts to create, 10 energy per I think
mychlr ' # of choloplasts you have, 20 at max, which is a dumb limit, but oh well
Source code:
https://bitbucket.org/Shasta/bitlife
Requires .net 4 to run and Visual Studio 2010 (any version, express should work) to build.
Executable attached in zip
Edit: The program should actually work now.
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Ah, cool that you're borrowing DB3 code :) Yay for modularity. I'll pretend you did that because it's great code an not because you were in a hurry. It is sexy to see some (simple) bots written in the new language.
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The attachment link wasn't working in my Firefox, but it's fine in Chrome. Not sure what that's about.
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I think there's a x86/x64 type issue. When I try to start a sim I get a "this program has performed an illegal operation" windows box. Debugging it, I see this exception:
"Could not load file or assembly 'Sunweaver, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format." I think that means you built Sunweaver in x86 (All DB3 projects are set to x86 because of XNA compatibility issues right now), but your main program was built with "Any CPU".
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On the subject of exceptions, you might want to wrap the entire program in a try/catch block and spit out a dialog box with exception information if one gets thrown. Makes debugging in the wild slightly easier.
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Ah, cool that you're borrowing DB3 code :) Yay for modularity. I'll pretend you did that because it's great code an not because you were in a hurry. It is sexy to see some (simple) bots written in the new language.
Well, I did get approval from the professor to use the library quite early on in the quarter. The fact that we ended up doing our quarter long project in a couple of the days was entirely unrelated :P Everything actually went really smoothly though, we definitely wouldn't have been able to crank it out as fast as we did with out Sunweaver. Ran into a couple of snags, but they were manageable; fun one: != can not be parsed currently, but hey, = not does the same thing.
The attachment link wasn't working in my Firefox, but it's fine in Chrome. Not sure what that's about.
Works fine here, will poke around for what may be the cause though.
I think there's a x86/x64 type issue. When I try to start a sim I get a "this program has performed an illegal operation" windows box. Debugging it, I see this exception:
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Well that's rather embarrassing, I had just specifically fixed that problem, and then I upload the wrong files :wacko: Check the top post for an updated zip.
On the subject of exceptions, you might want to wrap the entire program in a try/catch block and spit out a dialog box with exception information if one gets thrown. Makes debugging in the wild slightly easier.
Even better, in WPF you can set a property on your Application: DispatcherUnhandledException that raises an event when an exception is unhanded. I threw a window I wrote for that purpose a while back in to the new version.
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If you can make a list of snags with Sunweaver while it's fresh in your mind that would be great. I'm not going to get it in to DB3 for a while.
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We use WPF for some stuff at work. What's it's main difference vs. winforms? I might look in to it at some point if I have time. I'm actually doing a bit of UI work for DB3 right now.
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It seems to multithread pretty well (well, at least across 2 cores). That's cool.
I notice that you're lock-stepping the drawing with the simulation. If you copy the simulation into a buffer and draw things from the buffer, you can decouple the simulation and the graphics display. That way you don't have to pause the display to ramp up the sim speed. You don't even need everything from the simulation, just whatever you need to draw stuff.
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It seems to multithread pretty well (well, at least across 2 cores). That's cool.
I notice that you're lock-stepping the drawing with the simulation. If you copy the simulation into a buffer and draw things from the buffer, you can decouple the simulation and the graphics display. That way you don't have to pause the display to ramp up the sim speed. You don't even need everything from the simulation, just whatever you need to draw stuff.
Yeah, the multithreading is a bit... interesting. I'll leave it at that. The simulation does run in another thread and should actually be fairly easy to entirely decouple it, if you turn off drawing there is a significant speed increase. WPF really just can't handle what we were trying to do to it (at least in that manner), the whole drawing section of code probably should be rewritten.
If you can make a list of snags with Sunweaver while it's fresh in your mind that would be great. I'm not going to get it in to DB3 for a while.
- != does not parse think it had something to do with being an unrecognized type
- Duplication of DNA for reproduction. I implemented it as a cascading chain of copy constructors all the way from DNA down to codule, then did member-wise clones of the base-pairs
- For saving simulations: I just used serializable all the way down to the base-pairs, so I had to go though and mark stuff to not get serialized. (VMs mostly I think) this is another way to potentially do DNA duplication, probably should run some benchmarks
- Wanted some way to see current state of the DNA: passed a string builder around traversing through the children and finally appending basepair.ToString() to it.
- Way to read in a bot from a file (I did this in a quick hack sort of a way)
- Some of the stack modification commands seem to be missing (overbool, dupbool, can't remember what else)
- Some way of getting a list of sysvars into the simulation rather than hard coding them would be a really good idea
- EDIT: There were some bugs with string split and empty arrays, easily solvable by using StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries and some length checking.
Those were the only changes I made directly to Sunweaver, some of those things are specific to what I wanted at the time, not sure how they should actually be implemented. I'll go through and fix the bugs I found at some point during break here. I'm also planning on running a profiler over the initial loading of the simulation; it is really slow, not sure if that is caused by Sunweaver or myself.
We use WPF for some stuff at work. What's it's main difference vs. winforms? I might look in to it at some point if I have time. I'm actually doing a bit of UI work for DB3 right now.
I would highly recommend using WPF over WinForms given the choice.
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The attachment link wasn't working in my Firefox, but it's fine in Chrome. Not sure what that's about.
Found what this was and applied a fix. Apparently SMF had a bug with the newest version of Firefox.
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I like the name "Sunweaver" how did Numsgil come up with that one?
Totally need a splash screen, it was loading for 3 minutes...
oh boy:
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Viewer.Board.refresh(Map m)
at Viewer.MainWindow.background_worker_RunWorkerCompleted(Object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.OnRunWorkerCompleted(RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.AsyncOperationCompleted(Object arg)
at System.Windows.Threading.ExceptionWrapper.InternalRealCall(Delegate callback, Object args, Int32 numArgs)
at MS.Internal.Threading.ExceptionFilterHelper.TryCatchWhen(Object source, Delegate method, Object args, Int32 numArgs, Delegate catchHandler)
ok, finally got it to work. The programs simplicity makes it cool.
Might wana look into program hangs a bit like after 1717 cycles.
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Making fun names for modules is the best part of coding! :P
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Totally need a splash screen, it was loading for 3 minutes...
Hrm, that's odd, starting a simulation can certainly take a long time, but just loading the program should be very fast.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Viewer.Board.refresh(Map m)
at Viewer.MainWindow.background_worker_RunWorkerCompleted(Object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.OnRunWorkerCompleted(RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.AsyncOperationCompleted(Object arg)
at System.Windows.Threading.ExceptionWrapper.InternalRealCall(Delegate callback, Object args, Int32 numArgs)
at MS.Internal.Threading.ExceptionFilterHelper.TryCatchWhen(Object source, Delegate method, Object args, Int32 numArgs, Delegate catchHandler)
Fixing bugs in this is a fairly low priority for me now (got a grade and what not already :P), but I may give it a go at some point.
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Making fun names for modules is the best part of coding! :P
err, sorry Numsgil there was no sarcasm (or attempted sarcasm) attached to why I wanted to know how you came up with "sunwhewer", I really just wanted to know. I guess it make sense because the sun makes things mutate.
Might wana look into program hangs a bit like after 1717 cycles.
Never mind, it was my cpu.
Fixing bugs in this is a fairly low priority for me now (got a grade and what not already :P), but I may give it a go at some point.
I found two more bugs: When I try to load an existing simulation. Also, when after about a good 10 hours I tried to open a DNA I got a crash. Ouch. I had no way of saving my results of a zero bot sim. At least I will tell you about it:
Basically I put a whole bunch of zero bots , and set motion cost to nothing. I got all the robots on screen move top left except for the vegs. The vegs where set 48x1000x48x48.
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It's not that hard to come up with cool codenames. Basically the criteria is:
- 2 or 3 syllables
- Good mouth feel (subjective quality)
- Unusual enough word that its use will be unique in context
- Noun
- Meaning tangentially related to project
examples:
- Glassworks (a C++ GUI I worked on long ago)
- Sunweaver (DNA language. Name has mental connections with Dreamweaver, the web page authoring tool)
- Lodestone (physics module. Lodestones are magnetic stones so there's sort of a link there)
- Azimuth (math library. The term relates to astronomy and geometry and angles)
- Annulus (geometry library. Annulus is the name for a washer shape)
- Succession (A C++ game I worked on long ago. The idea was that it would model ecological succession)
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Oh also: Lima - Goddess of thresholds and doorways and also the name of a UI library for Darwinbots.
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KOOL