Darwinbots Forum
Welcome To Darwinbots => Newbie => Topic started by: SourApples on February 15, 2010, 11:40:35 PM
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Hello all, I have just discovered Darwinbots TODAY. I wish I would have known about this earlier. I have been playing a very similar game swimbots, but this simulation is WAYYY better.
Anyways, if anyone would tell me how I would go about setting up a zerobot simulation I would be a very happy camper.
Thanks in advance.
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I have also found DarwinBots today! and i have also located the wiki about these Zerobots:
http://www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=Zerobot (http://www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=Zerobot)
That is all i can offer, because I am also a newb, I can't even figure out how to code a working bot.
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I have also found DarwinBots today! and i have also located the wiki about these Zerobots:
http://www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=Zerobot (http://www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=Zerobot)
That is all i can offer, because I am also a newb, I can't even figure out how to code a working bot.
Thanks for the help, but that wiki page does no good for me. I would like a step by step guide on how to set up a zerobot simulation.
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I haven't done alot of zerobot sims but i had a program a while back which generates 256 lines of 40 random numbers each. It seems to work better than giving them all zeros because they don't have to gradually increase the zeros in order to do anything. Unfortunatley its saved on a broken computer so i'll have to rewrite it.
Oh and make sure to set the costmultiplier to a negative number so they don't all die. That tends to happen.
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Welcome!
you might see my recent thread (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=3271&pid=1381532&st=0&#entry1381532) where I set up a zerobot sim. Word of warning: you'll want to increase the mutation rate, at least until you get a replicator going. I've been running it for about 2 months and now replicators yet. But then, I am the patient sort
You might also want to totally get rid of all costs, at least to start. Even with very few costs, I've had several dozen bots learn to kill themselves.
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I guess I shall tell you guys what I am doing right now in regards to "zerobotting"
Settings:
The Zerobot has 30 zeroes
I set it as a vegatable
I changed the vegatable settings so if they do learn how to reproduce they will be able to.
Width:16000
Height:12000
Mutation rates are as following
Point: 1-5000
Delta:1-50000
Copy:1-500
Insertion:1-5000
Reversal:1-5000
Major and Minor deletion:1-5000
And everything else is default.
I have no idea if I am doing this correctly. Also I have no idea what you mean by "costs" Please help.
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I included the settings I'm using in the post I linked. That would be a good place to start.
The default mutation rates are probably a tad high (so you'll want to increase the numbers from their default (5000 I believe) to maybe like 10000).
You probably want significantly more than 30 0s in the DNA. In our experience from various people's attempts, zerobots tend to shrink their DNA over time once they start replicating. Once they strip it down to 8 bps, there's not much room for improvement. You'll be much better off with more like 100 0s. I'm doing 1000 0s in my sim, for instance. Word of warning, though: the longer the DNA, the slower the sim will take to run. With just zerobots, physics and vision simulation time is negligible, and most of the simulation time is spent executing DNA. All 0s in the DNA will execute quite fast, but once the DNA mutates to do various commands it can bring the simulation to a crawl (my sim is 5x slower than when I started).
There should be a "physics and costs" tab. There's an "Advanced costs" button you can click to open up more options. In the settings I provided in my thread, most are set to 0 except for moving, shooting, and building stuff. But even with that I've had bots learn how to die, (presumably the most promising bots for learning to replicate) so for quicker results I would recommend that all those numbers be 0. You can turn them on again later once you have some bots that can survive.
With all the costs set to 0, you shouldn't need to give any nrg to the sim, (the only energy loss possible is if a bot learns to shoot -2 shots and they don't hit anything, or if a bot shoots -1 or -6 shots (feeding shots) and they hit the other bot but the returning nrg shots don't make it back to the feeding bot for whatever reason). So you wouldn't have to set the bots as veggies (which has always been a bit artificial IMO).
Also, once the bots start replicating, make sure that there are no more than 1 new mutations per generation over time. Preferably that number should be even lower. Like 10 generations per new mutation. Otherwise you don't have evolution, you just have random behavior.
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I would try to keep copy mutations low because once you get reproducers, you don't want them to produce sterile kids. But if you have higher delta then once they gain reproduction they can tweak their own mutation rates. Also, 30 zeros seems to small, the more the merrier.
Costs are under "physics and costs" and then click "custom simulation costs" HOWEVER: if you don't have the proper dll installed it will crash it so make sure you test it first.
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Welcome!
you might see my recent thread (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=3271&pid=1381532&st=0&#entry1381532) where I set up a zerobot sim. Word of warning: you'll want to increase the mutation rate, at least until you get a replicator going. I've been running it for about 2 months and now replicators yet. But then, I am the patient sort
You might also want to totally get rid of all costs, at least to start. Even with very few costs, I've had several dozen bots learn to kill themselves.
I Downloaded the sim and started running it. I'll see how it goes.
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Keep in mind you'll probably need to tweak my settings if you want to get anything interesting anytime soon.
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Keep in mind you'll probably need to tweak my settings if you want to get anything interesting anytime soon.
Which ones should I Tweak?
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Mutation rates and costs. See the post before my last one.
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Allright, I got the zerobot program...
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Alright it looks like I finally got it down. Thanks alot guys.
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Alright it looks like I finally got it down. Thanks alot guys.
Now that I have run the simulation for awhile I am still running into some problems.
Eventually the simulation has bots that can reproduce. But they reproduce so many times that it makes my computer lag crippling the cycles per second down to 3.
Is there any way you can put a cap on the population? NOTE: the zerobots are not vegetables. Do you think this is a problem as well?
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That's sort of expected. Other than a large limit on the numbers of bots (probably 1K or 2K) you should let them do that. Eventually one will learn to eat as well, and the bot count will go down.
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That's sort of expected. Other than a large limit on the numbers of bots (probably 1K or 2K) you should let them do that. Eventually one will learn to eat as well, and the bot count will go down.
Also, is there any way I can make it less laggy? Right now I'm at 4.1 cycles a second
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Not really. 4 cycles/sec is probably about as fast as you should expect for a large sim.
You can turn off graphics, of course. That saves some time on systems with slower graphics cards. But when you're running that slow it's not going to make a huge difference.