Messages

31

The Gene depository / Demo of new vision capabilities

« on: November 21, 2006, 08:03:07 AM »

Interesting. I'm working through it trying to work out what it all means

Always nice to see new capabilities for our little script-driven friends.

So .eyeNdir sets the direction in which to point eyeN, .focuseye sets which eye has focus (gets refvars) and you can access the focus eye regardless of whichever eye it happens to be through .eyef?

Have another cookie.

32

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Zerobot sims

« on: November 17, 2006, 08:56:11 AM »

Yes I think a cost per bp over a certain threshold would be a good thing, perhaps a similar to aging costs with a log.

Then again, would this just turn viruses into an offensive weapon? Slap enough copies of your own dna into an adversary and they'll be crippled by the dna length costs!

I think an important thing to think about is why viruses are so often exploited by ex nihilo sims. It seems to be more common than shooting -1 shots from what I've seen so far! (I'm willing to concede that in a situation like this, I might just be at the thin end of the bell curve and my experience might not be typical)

While I personally would like to see a Lua script managing costs (and indeed everything else!) I think it would scare off even more people than a large screen of input boxes. Perhaps this would be better as an alternative or a supplement to the current system, but the layout and the explainations could be better. A large number of common sims on a drop-down menu would be a good idea. DB almost scared me away, and I'm not exactly "the n00b" when it comes to computers!

33

Newbie / What is "Amplification"?

« on: November 16, 2006, 08:13:11 AM »

In a super-long-term sim I've seen "Delta mutations changed Amplification from X to Y" a couple of times, but never before or since. What is this "Amplification"?

34

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Zerobot sims

« on: November 16, 2006, 08:09:04 AM »

Yeah, who'd've thunk it? Viruses aren't used much by human bot designers but evolutionary sims take the idea and run with it. The problem with viruses I've found is like my opening post, I get hundreds of viruses infecting the same bots, leading to dna 7000 units long, bringing the entire thing to a grinding halt.

I've been focussing on the animal side of things, I have created a "zeroVeg" which I used in these sims which is nothing more than

start
0
stop
end

with mutations disabled and then setting max veggies to one more than the repopulation threshold. This means that the veggies aren't drawing much computing power (less even than Alga Minimalis).

I've got an old laptop which can maintain a zerobot sim (although I like the term ex nihilo and will now use it instead!) for weeks on end, and I will put ZeroVeggie in to bake for a week or so to see what happens.

I've actually avoided putting in aging costs altogether, I reasoned that since these bots are going to be spending a lot of cycles at least initially sitting there waiting to evolve some dna to do anything at all, the aging cost would kill them. I normally set up dynamic costs to maintain about twice the initial seed population with generous boundaries. Do you find that aging costs don't kill everything like I thought?

35

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Zerobot sims

« on: November 15, 2006, 05:26:57 AM »

I've been running some zerobot sims for a while now and I can't say I've actually managed to get much in the way of evolved useful characteristics. Apart from the one time a bot managed to place its entire dna into a virus and transfer about 700 copies into a single veggie, which then took over the sim...

Anyone else managed to get anything interesting or useful? How about we collaborate a bit and if you get a viable bot (even mildly!) on a zerobot sim, post the bot here and perhaps us other zerobot-simmers can run sims on that bot.

36

Announcements / Version 2.42.9 now available

« on: November 14, 2006, 08:29:01 AM »

Crushed the cursed 'Array Locked' bug.

Have a cookie.

37

Suggestions / Eyes

« on: November 13, 2006, 10:19:51 AM »

How about making which eye has focus changeable?

Strip the special status from eye5, and make eye5 the default "focus" eye, the way it currently is, and designate a memory location to hold an identifier to say which of the eyes has focus. So stick a 2 in it, and eye2 has focus. Stick a 9 in it and eye9 has focus. I don't really see why this should have much in the way of prohibitive costs, unless you want to give bots the option of focussing multiple eyes simultaneously.

This also has the benefit of not breaking existing bots

38

Suggestions / Eyes

« on: November 10, 2006, 08:01:30 AM »

Bots should have access to as much information as possible - but I don't believe that they should have any real form of processing done for them, that should all be coded or evolved.

I'd suggest having a separate set of eyes for sensing different objects - keep the eye system the way it is and use those eyes for seeing bots. Add some more eyes for seeing shapes, and more eyes for seeing shots. More eyes for seeing teleporters. And so on. That might over-complicate things a little though.

How about making eyes see everything, but only returning the closest object it can see whether it is shot, bot, shape or whatever? And add a second set of eyes which returns a broad category of what that eye is looking at - bot, shot etc. It might be interesting to see the effect it has on continually-shooting bots - they'd effectively blind themselves whenever they shoot, so perhaps exclude a bot's own shots.

39

Suggestions / Muscles, Fat, and Chloroplasts

« on: November 08, 2006, 06:35:57 AM »

If you're considering this change, might it be worth considering changing the way feeding shots work?

How about changing it so that instead of simply returning a lump of nrg, a feeding shot triggered a return of a proportion of the target's various substances? So that a bot feeding off a very "fat" bot would get a little nrg and a large amount of fat, for example.

Perhaps this could be expanded to include waste (so bots maintaining a high but non-lethal amount of waste could be a viable defense) and perhaps muscle and chloroplasts (although the idea of an animal gaining chloroplasts might be a bit unbalancing, so perhaps muscle and chloroplasts could be converted to nrg or fat before being returned).

Just a suggestion.

40

Newbie / Can DB actually open a .dbo file?

« on: November 01, 2006, 05:44:22 AM »

The hard drive is not full (13GB free), but I wouldn't be surprised if a sudden explosion of reproduction brought the entire thing to a standstill. I wonder if a cancerously reproducing bot with 600+ mutations can eat memory faster than virtual memory can be allocated?

Incidentally, is there any documentation on the anatomy of a .dbo file?

41

Suggestions / Muscles, Fat, and Chloroplasts

« on: October 30, 2006, 10:06:07 AM »

Shvarz, I bow to your superior knowledge, consider me corrected and one step closer to perfection.

42

Newbie / Can DB actually open a .dbo file?

« on: October 30, 2006, 10:02:23 AM »

Seems like a silly question to me, but its stumped me. I ran a week-long zerobot sim with regular saves of the "best" bot. Naturally the program gave an "out of memory" error and crashed, leaving me with a tantalisingly frozen screen listing a non-zero number of births.

Aha! I thought, I shall simply start a new sim with the "best bot" just before the sim crashed! Unfortunately, I can't find a way for DB to import anything but .txt or .org files, when the "best bot" is saved as a .dbo file.

Am I just being thick?

43

Suggestions / Gestation and Maturity

« on: October 27, 2006, 09:16:50 AM »

How about limiting the number of birth ties a bot is allowed to have at any one time to one each? So a child cannot reproduce until it has been untied, and a parent can only have one child at a time.

44

Suggestions / Gestation and Maturity

« on: October 26, 2006, 10:41:52 AM »

There is already a mechanism in place for "stress" that hasn't been mentioned in this thread so far - waste.

How about making reproduction generate a little waste in the "parent"? That way we can still have the good old cancerous explosions but the bots will find themselves crippled by waste unless they can evolve some way of dealing with the by-products. I always think it is best to use existing mechanisms in novel ways rather than arbitrary UI impositions.

45

Suggestions / Muscles, Fat, and Chloroplasts

« on: October 26, 2006, 10:32:16 AM »

My assertion that muscle is broken down for preference comes from an A-Level Biology course I took about a decade ago so, I am not sure I can back it up convincingly!

The following quote is from The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy http://www.merck.com/mrkshared/mmanual/sec...chapter2/2b.jsp

Free fatty acid levels rise as fat is released from adipose tissue to provide energy. Blood glucose falls and is maintained at a lower level by synthesis of glucose in the liver from amino acids released from muscle. Plasma amino acid levels rise initially as muscle is broken down but then fall as starvation proceeds, with essential amino acids decreasing more than nonessential amino acids. Plasma insulin is low, glucagon is high, and serum albumin is near normal as long as muscle is broken down to provide amino acids for protein synthesis in the liver. Protein catabolism, in general, decreases with starvation, reflected by a reduction in urinary urea and total nitrogen.

It is not entirely clear above, but it seems that muscle is broken down quite early in the process rather than as a last resort. So I guess it isn't the first resort but it would appear not to be among the last tissues cannibalised for its component amino acids.

My reasoning has always been that high energy density structures are always easier to break down for energy than they are to create. Compare wood with the atmospheric carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that it was created from - its easier to extract energy from wood than it is from an equivalent amount of free atmospheric gases.

While yes muscle is fantastically inefficient as a method of storing energy, it is a very rich source of energy once the effort of constructing it has been accomplished. That's why carnivores require less volume of food than herbivores - muscle (protein and fat) has a much higher energy level than vegetables (cellulose and sugars). I think I'm wandering a little off topic here, so I'll stop this now.

I'm perfectly willing to concede that I'm arguing from half-remembered and misunderstood schoolboy science classes from a decade ago