Messages

16

Suggestions / Some DNA-Related Feature Requests

« on: September 21, 2007, 03:31:18 PM »

Some dna-related sysvars. Would make evolution rather interesting and provide some routes for horizontal gene transfer, as well as giving bot programers a new array of tools to play with.

.sendgene (instantly sends a gene through a tie, like a virus)
.crossover (crosses over the DNA of two tied bots at a certain number of random points)
.mutgene (makes one random point mutation to a gene)
.mutate (mutates the entire genome by a certain amount)
.refdnalen (returns the dna length of the bot I am looking at; possible new form of conspec recognition allowing for speciation of bots with mutations that change the genome length)

Anyone have any objections to having any of these?

17

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Come join the F1 megaverse!

« on: September 20, 2007, 06:19:38 PM »

I've released some Bestia Mactabilis to the net. I'm really quite proud of these ones: they're good dogfighters and make use of a colourful repetoir of dirty tricks, countermeasures and combat skills.

I also briefly ran a sim with no bots of my own. Some multipys teleported in. After some experimentation, I found out they had no virus immunity. I sent the virus-infected multiplys back out into the wild. Heh. heh. heh.

18

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Come join the F1 megaverse!

« on: September 14, 2007, 03:58:57 PM »

I'm trying to resist the temptation to take the worst, most destructive viruses I've created and push them all through the teleporter  

I've released Durus Uredo onto the net. It evolved in a very harsh environment, so it's very good at surviving in an extreme range of costs and environments. A newly debugged Una is also out there.

What are the settings you're all using to run internet-enabled sims?

19

Bugs and fixes / Problems with 2.44f

« on: September 14, 2007, 01:24:12 PM »

Is it just me, or is .sharenrg not working properly? It seems to stop transfering energy after a few moments of use.

EDIT: Ah, okay then. Thanks.

20

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / I have an idea

« on: September 12, 2007, 12:54:10 PM »

The best method I have come across to "speed up evolution" is to cap the maximum bot age.

Generation time is reduced, and genes that confer benefits at a gene-level (ie. that benefit offspring) are selected over genes that benefit individual bots.

Although it is a little artificial, I've has excellent results with this strategy.

I don't think it's 'speeding up' evolution so much as disadvantaging 'bad' (from our and genes' PoV) mutations.

To speed up DB evolution proper, get a faster computer

21

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic

« on: August 03, 2007, 12:58:38 PM »

2. If I have constant-shooting bots in the sim, the shepherds wander into their line of fire and get killed (despite having maxed out shell and a large body).

How about setting energy-per-veg-per-cycle to something enormous like 99999, then the shepherd bots (only vegs in the sim, right?) will have practically infinite energy (might make them a little slow due to body filling up though)

22

Darwinbots3 / Bot DNA

« on: August 02, 2007, 11:46:18 AM »

"cond
*.tmemval *.setbuoy >=

Can I have my free energy now?"

 

Evolution will take advantage of negative costs, creating junk DNA to grab the rewards with the minimum of effort. There's nothing in the contract that says the condition has to be useful! Zero costs are good, since then there's no selective pressure away from conditions (useful ones included).

23

Newbie / Help !!!

« on: August 01, 2007, 05:44:01 AM »

It is now.

Zerobots are a kind of ultra-purist mutation sim - 100% self-evolved with no user DNA input.

If you have any new insights or there's something you feel needs doing/adding/correcting on the wiki, feel free to register and edit it.

24

Newbie / How did you find DarwinBots?

« on: August 01, 2007, 05:38:50 AM »

What story is that? Could you provide a link?

Link

25

Bot Challenges / Challenge #2: The Maze

« on: July 12, 2007, 03:25:41 PM »

Here's the maze I'd made (by hand) for it (attached).

And yeah, delgening the immobiliser gene would be cheating.

26

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Its might really be good to have sexrepro

« on: July 02, 2007, 05:24:56 PM »

Simplest (and possibly best - opinions?) method of sexual reproduction would seem to be a crossover method

• Take the DNA from both bots, and store them side by side into a 2 by <however long (in bps) the longest DNA strand is> array
• Generate a random number from 1 to <however long the shortest DNA strand is minus one> and call it n
• Swap (I think to do a swap you might need an extra column in which to temporarily hold one of the values while you move the other across) the bps at position n of the DNA array, and then work upwards, swapping bps until you reach the top
• Repeat steps 2 and 3 an arbitrary, selected, bot-controllable or random number of times (or just the once)
• Pick one of the columns of the array at random, and store that into the offspring's DNA array

1 4 2 6 3 5 7 3
5 7 3 5 6 8 8 2 1

n = 4

After one crossover

5 7 3 5 3 5 7 3
1 4 2 6 6 8 8 2 1

27

Announcements / Insane new captcha

« on: June 15, 2007, 11:39:01 AM »

Looks like the equation stuff is now broken. See here

28

Suggestions / Ref sysvar command

« on: June 07, 2007, 05:16:47 PM »

How about increasing the sysvar space for vital sysvars? So for example .repro occupies 1 to 20, .up occupies the ten after that, and so on, with a much compressed number of vital sysvars (ie. merging .sx/.dx etc. since one is just the negative of the other) but over a larger area, making them more probable. More specialist sysvars, such as .trefvelsx etc. would only occupy one sysvar space, and so would be less probable to evolve (reflecting it's greater complexity of function as opposed to much more fundamental functions such as movement or reproduction (not that reproduction is in any way simple in real life).

29

Suggestions / Death Rate

« on: May 29, 2007, 10:32:53 AM »

A cost that increase waste would probably cause all bots to go crazy doing all things not written in the dna because of altzeimers, a complete chaos on the screen. Ageing should only make it harder to survive I think.

What I mean is an energy cost per unit of waste you have, instead of altzimers. Waste would just sap energy. It should have been worded "cost per unit waste per cycle"

30

Suggestions / Death Rate

« on: May 28, 2007, 03:56:16 PM »

How about using waste for the aging death. You could have accumulating waste sap energy from bots proportional to the amount present (a new option in the costs form: "Waste cost per cycle").
I like the idea of waste being a mutagen too, increasing the probability of point mutations as it builds up (possibly a tickbox: "Mutagenic waste")

Sexual reproduction too, even if it were ultra-basic (ie. take every other base pair from each parent) would be interesting to have, and may be another element to have an acceleratory effect on evolution.

Random death would presumably be a slight selection pressure towards collectivism, although multicellularity at present seems to be too complex to evolve.
As for a mechanism: How about "fuzzying" the costs a little. A bot might be "charged" a little more or a little less than the standard cost. Rather than being definite rates, costs would be more probabalistic, like mutations, with a standard deviation from the average value.