Messages

16

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 12, 2007, 03:43:46 AM »

After 100 hours I still have not had any extinction level events. So score. Right now I've gotten the occasional reproduction event. But nothing that's been really repetitive, nothing is really bursting outward just yet. However at about 85 hours I did have a huge spike of 45 births. I have no idea what happened other than only 1 seems to have survived out of the 45 and that might be coincidental. My theory is that something reproduced and might have repeatedly split itself up until they all died but I don't know how likely that is. Regardless 45 bots were born (and I think they died off as the population level remained static almost and it wasn't that they killed an equal number of bots) and then 44 of those 45 died. So essentially all of them. After this I upped the frequency of the bleedbot being planted in a little to give newcomers better chances to get some energy and stick around, cause if they have any costs they are in a REAL hostile environment, need to baby them a little bit.

17

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 09, 2007, 02:41:57 PM »

After 50 hours and 8,300,000 cycles I had my first babies. Two bouncing baby dots. Well not so much bouncing as sitting there slowly spinning.

So far I haven't gotten any spinny death bots, I believe this is more a matter of luck than anything else as no bots have killed themselves shooting off all their energy. I looked at the dna of the parent and it's children and the differences are pretty great. I'm not sure if perhaps the children were born a long time ago and just had a lot of point mutations or if it's something else going on. Also looking at the dna I can't seem to see HOW it reproduced as there's no reproduction code in them so perhaps that mutated out too.

One thing I have noticed is that I don't seem to have evolved any active movers yet, still waiting on that. Also nothing shoots even a little I don't believe. That comes to a good question though. What's the best way to figure out what your bots are doing? When you have hundreds of bots all spinning and drifting how can you tell whats brownian movement and what's active actions?

18

Suggestions / Phermones/Chemical Markers

« on: December 07, 2007, 01:40:08 AM »

I was at work today (awesome job, really mundane and repetitive that gives me time to think and with sweet pay) and I was thinking about the idea of using chemical markers. Essentially you'd have a number of chemicals. Basically just numbered "chem 1" "chem 2" ect. A bot can drop a chem where it is or a short distance away and that marker stays where it is. Any bot when it reaches within a distance of the chemical will "smell" it. Basically to a bot without the right dna it will not do a thing, won;t even notice it. But lets say "chem 1" means danger. A bot recently was attacked and it released this chemical as a response, any bot with the right set up will smell the chem and enter flee mode.  I'm not very good at explaining this idea, it'd be neat but whether it'd even be worthwhile is an entirely different matter. I think the basics of it would be like this though:

drop Chem X
drop chem X strength (distance in which it can be detected from point of origin)
drop chem X distance (how far from bot center to place chem, probably which way the eye is facing too)

cond detect chem X

also an environment setting would be how fast the chemicals fade after being dropped.

Since it's pretty complex it might be only really usable in designed bots, I don't know if anyone has the lifespan to see something like this used by evolved bots =p There might be easier ways to pass information between bots as well, but it'd be a neat thing to see used to mark off territories. Have safe areas where bots like to stay and they mark it as safe with chemicals.

19

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Peter's zerobot sim

« on: December 07, 2007, 01:28:37 AM »

That's pretty interesting, I'll have to look into how the random bot generator works though it might not be too surprising to see things pop up so fast. Also kind of a nitpick but this isn't a zerobot sim, it's something else entirely. A zerobot uses and essentially blank bot that eventually gains the ability to reproduce, move, shoot, ect. From point mutations and then after reproduction from the other methods as well.

20

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 06, 2007, 02:10:46 PM »

Alright, started up my new sim. I'm using the bleednrg bot (thanks EricL) to feed my bots. Unfortunately I tried with 500 bots and it slowed to a crawl was less than 10 frames a second and I imagine that would have only gotten worse as time went on so for now I'm using 250. I know zerobot sims require patience but I'm not quite ready for near real time evolution =p

Most settings are default, I removed DNA costs though to keep that from killing my bots off. The display area is nontoroidal. Also I added 2 blacklines in a "+" shape to seperate the area into 4 sections, the cutoff is not complete so each area can still access the others and the gaps are decently large. So off it goes.

21

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 05, 2007, 02:35:04 PM »

Code: [Select]

start
-2 .shoot store
stop
end
I think I deserve "Best Bot Maker Ever Award".

Thus why it does not spin but I'll make an attempt on that tonight. As for not dying and shooting proportional (I assume) shots, that might be an environment setting I am missing, but I did make some attempts on the wiki and just looking at all the panels to find it. I set nrg shots to a 200 cost, instead of the default proportional but that didn't seem to work.

Also just checked the bleed NRG bot, it looks good. Probably about what I was on my way to making, just with less junk as I inevitably add stuff that would not be needed cause I'm messy.

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Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 05, 2007, 02:22:37 PM »

What I think I would like to do to feed my bots is what EricL suggested with having a bot spew out energy every so often. I'm definitely not bat adept right now. I copy/pasted out a shooting gene, and set it to shoot out energy to anything it hits. I didn't figure out rotation yet but I only worked on it for a little bit so I know I can figure that out but if you want to just tell me as I'm sure it's easy I won't mind.

My big issue is that the energy it spews out I think is proportional to what energy it has remaining. The closer it gets to 0 the smaller the shots are worth, and then when it finally does hit 0 energy it doesn't die. Instead it just shoots 0 energy shots. Not really sure why it does this, any ideas?

23

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 05, 2007, 01:30:54 AM »

Sadly I wish the bot were an awesome 40 hour hunter =p Oddly enough I managed to evolve 2 independent spinny death bots within about an hour of each other which was kinda cool. All they do though is spin in a circle and shoot constantly. They have little shot costs and are autotrophs so they pretty much live forever. But that's basically cheating.

EricL: For shepard bots or other ways to keep heterotrophs alive, what would you suggest for the beggining of a zerobot sim? Since they are essentially helpless for so incredibly long I want to make sure they have a chance to survive long enough to actually evolve.

I'll likely start of a new one as there's lots of good ideas for initial conditions that I think should be used.

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Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 04, 2007, 04:58:18 AM »

If just one or few shooting bots manage to kill off all your bots I'm guessing you're running a sim that is too small. I would recommend starting with at least 500 bots (I started with 1000 bots and ran it for more than half a year) in a big field. It takes longer to run but it's rewarding if one is patient. You get more genetic material for interesting mutations to appear.

I currently only have 250 bots going. This is partly because my computer really slows to a crawl when I get higher than that. But importantly, I'm using the largest field size available. If one of these shooter bots went on and was able to kill everything as it was, wouldn't having 250 more bots on the field just give it more to kill?

Also in the beginning it's good with morphological costs only, so to encourage reproduction first and other behavior later.

Good point. I adjusted that. I almost wonder if I should try to exact my vengeance on Rotation. A while back I did a run where I tried to remove rotating bots. I disliked that basically all bots just spun in circles and there was no real pressure to stop doing that. In essence it just gives each bot a 360 degree view and that bugs me for some unknown reason. It might just be I hate the eye indicator spinning around when you select bots =p I don't know how much I'd want to try to pressure that though even if I wanted.

I suppose it doesn't matter much if you chose autotrophs or heterotrophs with energy shooters.
In my heterotroph sim though I found my bots have become more conservative with energy and do less. If I could just get a tie feeder or shooter.....
Also overfeeding is a little problem which can cause waste build-up and alzeimers; the bots ignore their dna instructions and do all sorts of crazy stuff.
You may want to set your waste treshold high if running such sim.
One could also make the energy shooters shoot a little less often, but I don't know how to write such bot yet. I guess using a timer or something.  

Duly noted. There's still lots I don't fully understand about how the program works, so I try to avoid messing with the settings, but this is one I know I can do.

25

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / 200 Hour Zerobot Sim

« on: December 04, 2007, 01:54:41 AM »

I decided to start up a zerobot sim on my computer for the many hours a day I'm not using it. After a few false starts I think I have everything all set and going well.

I decided to do everything as default as I could and try to stick to what I could gather EricL had done. I created a zerobot dna file, which I think I did right, and started it up. First time I did something dumb I can;t recall now, but I restarted it. The second time I disabled eyes to speed the sim up, I then attempted to turn eyes back on and either due to me missing something, or the option not being available I was unable to and started fresh.

Other info I have is that I do hourly saves, this will hopefully not be as necessary later on, but I'm not really short on drive space so I'm keeping them. All my bots are autotrophs with all characteristics active (dna execution, reproduction, virus vulnerable ect).

After 40 hours the bots have been building up some nice mutations each one having on average 148 mutations.

So after 40 hours I have noticed a little hurdle. No big deal really but something I have to keep an eye out for. Bots are learning to shoot far before reproducing. With them being autotrophs they basically can shoot nearly unlimitedly, and as a result the second a single "spiral shooty death" bot evolves it manages to kill all the bots and then itself dies as it shoots more than it takes in as a plant.

So right now every so often I check to see if my bots have been decimated, reload my saves and then if I see the bot before it has done anything bad I save it, then kill it off and resume. Or if I find a save before the bot mutates into Spinny Death, I just let it go on from there.

One thing I could do is to make shooting prohibitively expensive but I feel I'll lose out on a lot if I do this. Any other suggestions as to how I can help keep a single bot from destroying everything, or should I just keep playing momma?

26

Suggestions / Simple Resources

« on: March 23, 2007, 08:11:03 PM »

I'm fairly certain that this would have to affect a lot of other things than I would think, so I know it might not be too feasible.

I started a new sim where I have vertical gravity. The veggies spawn at the top of the box and fall down into the group of animal bots below. My thinking was that it's kinda like rain, but I know it's not similar enough but I thought it'd be interesting to try out.

The main reason I wanted to try this (although I didn't set it up right so I decided to not worry) was to have the veggies rain down onto the animals which are mostly if not all stationary, to see if they would grow upward and compete for area coverage.

We'll see what happens, but it did get me thinking. That instead of just giving the veggies (or photsynthetic bots) energy for free, that maybe a ray system could be set up so that for every ray of light you get like 1 NRG per cycle or something. So it's not given to them by default. And maybe in order for a bot to grow in size it's body mass could increase from another resource like dirt, and then have water be there to lubricate the natural systems, it can go towards certain costs of activity.

Not the best thought out or fleshed upon idea but I think you guys would get the idea. Maybe not a good idea for now but maybe farther down the development line this might be cool to take into account.

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Simulation Emporium / Guys, you have to see this!

« on: March 22, 2007, 09:56:38 AM »

Giving it a shot

28

Newbie / A Hello, and a Question

« on: March 21, 2007, 10:24:29 PM »

I was actually just "served" by my own bots. (My girlfriend's words)

I set it up so that when the population dips under 50 the costs turn off (safeguard from extinction before the "goal" reached), then the population is safe until it hits a population of 90. I though that maybe this system of bursts and then whittleing away of the least viable bots would yield some results that I wanted. My goal was to stop them from spinning so damn much, crazy bots them.

So this morning I wake up and check the progress, and Hooray! The bots stopped turning.

Then I looked closer, they weren't eating either.

Nor were they reproducing.

Nor were they reacting to each other.

DAMN! The bots basically shut themselves down, but the trick was they managed to get their to dip below 50, then rise to 70, but never to reach up to 90. The population basically found that bubble of stability and stayed there, they could have lived forever.

Until I turned the costs back on to test my theory, and out of spite of their laziness =p

I learned a few tricks though, I might gain some patience and keep the population a bit higher like 100-200, but even with lower numbers I can do better.

Also keep in mind this nearly 30 million cylce sim was all done in a week, constantly running. That's what I like about low population =]

29

Newbie / A Hello, and a Question

« on: March 21, 2007, 12:42:21 AM »

My at least sideways attempts have been to try and make it so that the conditions require a more advanced system each time I progress it. I think all I have been accomplishing is making them more efficient. I think it would help if my computer was a bit better. I might just be impatient though, I like it when things can run 100 cycles a second or more, so the population size I try to keep down. I guess this isn't so much advancement through diversity as it is trying to make it so a single really beneficial trait becomes of immediate benefit.

To that extent things have worked well. The bots adapted to all the pressures I have put them through but there are some limitations. I think the bots themselves are very well done, they can do a large number of amazing things when programmed, I'd love to see what can happen when it's by chance.

One of the bots I saw was the Ant one, that is really awesome and shows just what a designer can do, and I know that in time evolution could potentially create the same thing, but what it comes down to is what kind of pressures would be needed to create that?

I don't know, and naturally I surmise that no one really has a good answer, but maybe that's something I need to figure out, is what types of pressure encourage wild deviations, while what pressures force the bot down to it's most effective, yet most base systems.

I'm sure there's a thread better suited for such ideas, but like a real ecology, maybe the food system should be revamped in some ways? At the moment a bot seems to be able to eat anything it feels like all it needs is the impetus to do so. What if it needed more, the right genes to digest, not the right genes to simple attack? Least then you'd get bots that have mutated to where they are ineffective in one setting yet widly successful in another.

At least in my sim which has run 28,000,000 cycles, I know I have lost many new things just because Being strange is almost ALWAYS deadly, and there's little in the way of benign mutations.

30

Newbie / A Hello, and a Question

« on: March 20, 2007, 01:52:02 PM »

This is my first post, and just saying hi. I tried out Darwinbots what may have been even a year or two ago and I thought it was a really neat and cool program. I could never quite get the hang of it though and all my bots ever seemed to do was slow my computer down while being pretty much the same.

Now my computer is a bit better, I'm a bit smarter, and the program has really advanced. It's probably the most entertaining artificial life simulator out there. Glad it's still around and actively worked on =]

This is probably a bit of an advanced question, but I've been trying to make my bots become more advanced, but I can't seem to figure out what kind of settings to put things. For better or worse, I tend to restrict energy, and keep certain costs high. Right now I got bored of the bots spinning in circles, so I gave rotation a relatively high cost.

The bots do evolve to cope with the new conditions even if it takes a few days, but I can't seem to get beyond the "run in a line until you hit something and eat it". I assume a multibot bot (?) is something that's difficult to just evolve, and who knows with my settings perhaps they DID evolve and I just killed them off.

Not sure, I keep tinkering and slowly changing the environment to get different reactions. Regardless it's a hell of a lot of fun, just not sure if there is some tried and true method that I missed somewhere.