Messages

16

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

« on: February 03, 2007, 01:07:52 PM »

Fine with me.  A vector of random numbers would also be okay.  Any set of starting numbers would be fine as long as the entropy does not differ significantly from that of a pure zerobot.

Entropy is certainly not a relevant characteristics: a pure zerobot has minimal entropy, while a purely random genome has maximal entropy. Intuitively, both should be admissible because they incorporate no relevant information wrt. bot behaviour and evolution.

17

Off Topic / Daniel Dennett speech about ALIFE

« on: February 02, 2007, 06:07:27 AM »

Mmm, Iain M Banks, (rather than Ian Banks)

IMHO, this Iain M. Banks/ Iain Banks distinction is rather arbitrary. There's no doubt in my mind that books under both names were written by the same author.

I don't think I have read Ken Macleod before, is he worth a read?

If you like Iain Banks, certainly! His style is quite similar. The most striking difference is that where Banks evokes philosophical and sociological themes, MacLeod is more into politics and technology, but Learning the world could almost pass for a Banks novel.

18

Off Topic / Does Evolution Select For Faster Evolvers? Horizontal Gene Transfer Adds To Complexity, Speed Of Evolution

« on: February 01, 2007, 05:16:00 PM »

An interesting essay in Nature on the same topic.

And the original article at the source of the press release : [preprint].

19

Off Topic / Daniel Dennett speech about ALIFE

« on: February 01, 2007, 04:43:20 PM »

Individuals which got caught or which called too much attention to themselves, say by crashing or eating up too many resources, would be selected against.  The survivors would be the ones that kept a low profile, that learned to avoid AV programs, that perhaps even started doing something useful.  Hell, they could be living amoungst us already!  Someone shoudl write a SF novel with this plot.  Oh wait, that someone is me!

Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn describes the end result of such a process (though obviously not the "amongst us already" part). And the theme is also present in Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction.

20

Bug reports / Bitwise shift operators are incorrect

« on: January 27, 2007, 03:21:58 PM »

The way bitwise shift operators are implemented doesn't make any sense whenever one or both the operands are negative. There are several different ways of defining bit-shift operators, but I'll assume the one we want is the arithmetic shift. Shifts with negative offsets are usually errors, but we should probably take it to mean a shift in the reverse direction, with an offset equal to the absolute value of the offset specified.

Now, here are the results of some bitshift operations in 2.43:
-4 1 >> is 0, but should be -2
-4 1 << is 2, but should be -8
-4 -1 >> is -1, but should probably be -8
-4 -1 << is -2, but should probably be -2

21

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 1000 hour zerobot sim

« on: January 27, 2007, 12:48:49 AM »

I'm trying to make a script to deobfuscate evolved DNA as much as possible. Here's what I've got for a dark-blue bot:

Code: [Select]

cond
start
 -- 0 dist << dec
 10 pyth .setaim store
 49 >> >> rnd *.dx 3

cond
 27 1 -7 >=
start
 angle rnd inc
 dist 3 29 6 dist >> * inc
 *.dx 6 ceil - 1 1 14 dup 52 dist << dec
 10 dist 36 | ^ mult inc
 *20 6 angle << 1 1 dist *.robage dec
 49 inc
 10 ceil angle >> >> * inc
 *.shootval *.aimright angle & 1 0
else
 1 add 47 dist << dec
 -1 * inc
 *.robage 26 1

cond
 0 27 1 0 !~=
 xor
 mult 5 add pow >> 3 22 49 >=
 not
 << >> *.dx 6
start
 27 1 1 dist * inc
 dist 29 5 dist ^ * inc
 *.dx 6

cond
 and
 sqr - -6 0 !%=
start
 2209 dec
 dist 49 >> ^ * inc
 *14 .robage inc
 ceil << -8 angle - 5 -10 47 dist << dec
 0 >> sgn inc
 *.robage 6
else
 ^ store
 dist *23 inc
 49 inc
 16 ceil 29 >> >> * inc
and for a light-blue one:

Code: [Select]

cond
start
 | 1 add dec
 dist << dec
 10 ceil .setaim store
 49 >> >> * *.dx 6 angle 1 add 1

cond
 27 <
 -7 >=
start
 angle rnd inc
 dist 3 29 -4 dist >> * ceil - 1 1 14 dup 51 dist << dec
 10 dist 36 | ^ mult store
 *20 angle << 1 1 dist *.robage dec
 10 inc
 49 angle ceil >> >> * inc
 *.shootval *.aimright pow & 1 1 47 dist << dec
 -1 * inc
Note that both store 10 in .setaim. They probably share a not too distant ancestor, considering the similarity of their first gene.

22

DNA - General / I am trying to transmit my entier dna via virus.

« on: January 25, 2007, 11:40:24 AM »

Assigning several times to the same sysvar is no good. What you need to do for your first gene is something like that:

Code: [Select]

def counter 50

cond
 *.vtimer 0 =
start
 *.counter 3 mod ++ .mkvirus store
 .counter inc
stop

23

Bug reports / Bug in statistics

« on: January 25, 2007, 11:17:08 AM »

I may be missing somehting, but I think it's correct.

It probably is. I've seen since that I had some bots with a very large number of mutations. So the problem is just that the average is sometimes misleading.

24

Bugs and fixes / Large sim won't load

« on: January 24, 2007, 07:57:08 PM »

It appears that I can load a previous autosave, albeit with some mutation details removed. Which is no big deal since I'm forced to remove them anyway. So case closed, I guess.
Edit : the "Fix bot radii" checkbox doesn't seem to be working properly, and I don't recall having trouble with it before the save and reload.

Okay.  If you have looked at the code, you know there are two mutatiuon details length fields in the file.  One is the old integer one, the other is the new Long valued one.  Your script needs to set the old one to length 1 and set the new one appropriatly.  Or, you could just use the DB program itself to save without mutation details....

Actually, I set the short int value, not the long one. But, for some reason, it doesn't work, which is too bad because I'm quite fond of the sort of stuff I get with my phylogenetic tree script (see attachment) and I hoped to be able one day to strip mutation details without losing the information in them.

25

Newbie / zerobot sim

« on: January 24, 2007, 01:24:21 PM »

else 300 inc ' the else statement also toggles the FSM into a state where stores can be performed.

This one doesn't work: cond flag is initialised to True.

26

Bugs and fixes / Large sim won't load

« on: January 24, 2007, 01:21:41 PM »

You hand edited it using an editor, correct?

No, I used a script, parsing for mutation details and copying everything else, and also modifying the mutation details length bytefield according to the actual algorithm used in VB code. Yesterday, it seemed to work for other sim files, but not today. I guess I should send you the unedited files.

27

Bugs and fixes / Large sim won't load

« on: January 24, 2007, 12:55:27 AM »

The problem is with the mutation details in bot 2319.  The length of the mutation details is negative, which is an old old bug back when the program didn't allow more than 16k worth of mutation strings (about 300 mutations).

Did this sim originate in an older version of DB like 2.37.6?  Was it ever saved with an older version?

The sim was always run with 2.42.9t. I edited it to remove the mutations details, making sure that DB would read it correctly. I'm quite sure I didn't introduce a negative length.

28

Bugs and fixes / Large sim won't load

« on: January 23, 2007, 09:51:42 PM »

I have a (very) large sim which I can't load, no matter what I do. I've tried to strip the mutation details, successfully I believe since it works for other files, but the resulting file won't load either, with DB giving the same error message it gives for the full file: "blablabla Invalid property value DarwinBots 380 0".

I'm adding both files, in case my procedure is incorrect.

PS: Seeing the trouble I had to upload the small one, I won't upload the large file here.

29

Bugs and fixes / Large sim won't load

« on: January 23, 2007, 09:47:29 PM »

I have a (very) large sim which I can't load, no matter what I do. I've tried to strip the mutation details, successfully I believe since it works for other files, but the resulting file won't load either, with DB giving the same error message it gives for the full file: "blablabla Invalid property value DarwinBots 380 0".

I'm adding both files, in case my procedure is incorrect.

PS: This stupid forum won't let me upload files, I'll try again later...

30

Bug reports / Inconsistent handling of logic functions

« on: January 21, 2007, 07:51:29 PM »

I plan to do the latter unless there are objections.

Actually, I have one: it'll break some existing evolved bots. It's quite hard to know which proportion exactly, but it won't be negligible. However, such considerations have never prevented us from changing the program, so I think we can proceed.