Messages

61

Internet Mode Commentary / The State of the Simulation

« on: May 30, 2008, 04:56:24 PM »

Now it's working!

But anyway, nothing fun comes in   I get tons of SeaSnakes from Eric, but they can't compete with my Alga minimalis, even when ALL costs are turned off.  This really sucks, as I'm seeing a lot of diversity in behavior evolving even within my own sim. It goes through stages, I had "sit next to shape and fire" bots, then "just run and shoot" bots, then "spin and shoot" bots, and now they seem to move toward "run in circles" bots. Remember circumgyrans? Or whatever they were called...  Well, I have this stuff evolved in my sim. See the attached pic.

62

Internet Mode Commentary / The State of the Simulation

« on: May 28, 2008, 08:52:21 PM »

For the last two days I've had no luck connecting to the IM server   Not a singe time....

63

Biology / Crows are pretty damn smart

« on: May 24, 2008, 11:31:27 AM »

Maybe because I'm from Siberia, but I'm completely used to the idea that birds hoard food. There is almost no other way for wild birds to survive there.

Have you seen the famous video of the crow that makes (sic!) a tool to reach a piece of food?  Now, that is amazing!
Upd: Here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg...feature=related  and more on related videos

64

Bugs and fixes / Path/file error

« on: May 23, 2008, 06:29:00 PM »

Yep, I'm pretty sure it's the IM.  I ran the sim off-line all day today and there were no crashes. 5 minutes ago I turned on the IM and the program crashed.
For me it really started with the L version, I saw nothing like that in K.

Upd: Crashed again, within 5 min of IM. Would it help to turn off the teleporters to the local folder as a control experiment?

65

Bugs and fixes / Path/file error

« on: May 21, 2008, 04:14:37 PM »

Well, it took five hours to crash, but crash it did. The error message is: "Error. Path/file access error. Saving sim in saves directory as error.sim"

I was in IM at the time of crash.

66

Bugs and fixes / Path/file error

« on: May 20, 2008, 02:58:29 PM »

I'm pretty sure it's IM.  I just ran the sim off-line for about 1.5 hrs and it was fine. I switched IM on and got a crash within 5 minutes. Unlikely coincidence.
...
Darn!  I forgot to write down the error message. I'll be back in 5 minutes

Update: What do you know... It's been running for the last hour in IM with no crashes...

67

Bugs and fixes / Path/file error

« on: May 20, 2008, 11:39:09 AM »

Yes, I placed DB.exe into the DB folder
I'm using autosave for sims. I'm saving every couple of hours and keeping the last 10 saves. It worked fine till now.
I have a local folder where I teleport bots in and out. It's pretty full now, reaching ~1200 bots.
I don't know how IM works,  I used all the default settings, just changed my username. I'm running a sim now without IM to see if I still get an error.

68

Bugs and fixes / Path/file error

« on: May 20, 2008, 11:02:37 AM »

Not sure on why this happens. It's not re-population, because the number of veggies is high enough so that re-population should not happen. Error sounds something like: "Error. File/path access error. Darwinbots will now close". I don't remember exactly, if I see it again - I'll write it down. DB closes pretty cleanly - saves error.sim and quits, no process is left running in the background. Re-starting error.sim works.  I'm attaching the most recent error.sim here.

69

Bugs and fixes / Path/file error

« on: May 19, 2008, 08:40:59 PM »

This error is suddenly an issue for me. After switching to 2.43.1L, I've had three crashes within a couple of hours. Re-starting error.sim loads and runs OK.

70

Suggestions / gimmic for zerobot evolution

« on: May 19, 2008, 08:16:12 PM »

As a follow up to my previous post. Real organisms tend to have mutation rates on the order of 1 mutation per million to billion base pairs. Which in DB terms would equate to 1 mutation per 1000 or 1000000 generations. I think DB is a little more forgiving than real life in this regard, since a complex DB DNA might be a couple thousand bps, while the human genome has several billion bps, which bumps us back to something between 1 mutation per 1 to 1000 generations.

I would say a "default" mutation rate to aim for might be 1 mutation per 7 or 8 generations.

Just to resolve some confusion of terms:

Mutation rates can be counted as "per replication per nucleotide", I.e. the frequency of error during each individual step of DNA replication. Those vary widely from 10^-9 to 10^-4. These numbers reflect the accuracy of the copying machinery of an organism.

But you can also count mutation rate "per genome per generation", I.e. what proportion of genomes have at least one mutation. Those can be obtained (in a rough but fairly accurate estimation) by multiplying the mutation rate by the length of the genome. These vary a lot less. For humans it is 175 mutations in each replication cycle, but most of those happen in all the junk DNA (or are silent mutations) and thus they have no effect on phenotype.

Another important measure of mutation rates is how many mutations per generation do have an effect on phenotype. It is very difficult to estimate that for humans. But RNA viruses give us a clue as to the maximum possible. We know it's maximum because when we try to increase that mutation rate, viruses go extinct - they enter error catastrophe. For some viruses every third off-spring carries a mutation. We can estimate that about half of these mutations are silent. Thus, a single  mutation in ~6 offspring is about as much as an organism can handle.

These rates are difficult to translate to DB, because they are properties of genome complexity and genome organization.

71

Bugs and fixes / Another free energy bug? RESOLVED (DUPLICATE)

« on: May 19, 2008, 05:04:46 PM »

It fixed the problem!

72

Bugs and fixes / Another free energy bug? RESOLVED (DUPLICATE)

« on: May 19, 2008, 04:52:49 PM »

OK, I'll give it a try. Uploading does not work for me right now anyway.

73

Bugs and fixes / Another free energy bug? RESOLVED (DUPLICATE)

« on: May 19, 2008, 04:45:02 PM »

While waiting for 2.43.1l version to be released I decided to deal with the poison bug by raising the cost of making poison to 4 energy per poison unit. It seemed to help at first, but pretty soon after that the energy in the sim again climbed way up, and the number of bots went up as well.  So I'm suspecting that there is another free energy bug somewhere. The sim is attached.

74

Internet Mode Commentary / The State of the Simulation

« on: May 16, 2008, 04:46:14 PM »

I wrote SV and SV2 to demonstrate exactly this - that veggies are too powerful.

Well, they are too powerful only under F1 conditions. Simple tweaks in costs and feeding take their advantages away. SV and SV2 were never able to get even slightly successful in my sim, because I feed veggies per kilobody point and have no limit on the number of veggies, only on total energy in the sim. SV2 just explodes into a hundred tiny bots that don't possess enough body to get energy for running and surviving the "night". So they die out. Simple as that.

75

Suggestions / gimmic for zerobot evolution

« on: May 16, 2008, 04:39:07 PM »

Just my two cents:

I have seen a lot of hand-authored bots becoming better during evolution in DB. The trick is not to use the conditions for which the bot was originally coded. As a result, the hand-coded bot starts with low fitness and then improves over time. Often the improvements are enormous.

As far as bots that fit the environment for which they were designed, I don't think that hand-authored bots break down because their DNA is somehow non-fit to accommodate mutations. I think that much more frequently the coded features are simply not as beneficial as authors think they are. Thus bots loose them. Due to low population sizes and high mutation rates the amount of genetic drift is enormous in DB. When we improve the computation speeds and people start running larger sims we'll see a lot more preservation of hand-authored features and a lot more evolutionary improvements on hand-authored designs.

I'd like to take a minute here and once again call for running IM with pre-set conditions that are identical or very similar for all IM-connected sims. This should reduce the drift a lot and help the evolution.