Darwinbots Forum
Welcome To Darwinbots => Newbie => Topic started by: PurpleYouko on March 23, 2005, 05:01:29 PM
-
So how did You find your way to DarwinBots?
I discovered it at Home of the Underdogs. How about you?
:D PY :D
-
Same here.
-
I got interested in artificial life sims and started looking for one that allowed open-ended organism design, real evolution and cool small thingies running around on the screen. Went thrugh all links and DB was the first one that satisfied all these requirements.
-
I came across it on underdogs as well, took a look at it, gave up, found it again on my hard disk 6 months later :)
-
Was googling A-life and came across Home of the Underdogs site. DB was the coolest sounding A-life sim there and found my way to the homepage and from there to the forum. I just like the actual fighing in DB, much cooler than watching a bunch of numbers eat another bunch.
Endy B)
-
dont remember :wacko:
-
I discovered DB very early (at the beginging DB1.0). I was searching google for Artificial life.
-
my friend 2122,told me about it. I got interested and joinded the forum. :lol:
-
I was googling for artificial life.
Interesting enough, I found it after year of searching. Don't know why I didn't came accros before.
-
I was playing much with another art. evol. prg, where bots were made out of stiff sticks. But it was too specific, and one couldnt see into robbies' codes... :blueblob:
Then I found (with googling )http://frontrow.fontframe.com/index.php/Science/Biology/Evolution/Software
and thus the Real One. B)
-
interesting website
-
I used google and I sometimes spend hours trying to find the ultimate artificial life program. I've tried a lot of stuff. I found DarwinBots to be most interesting right now, dispite all the bugs. Hehe. I was surprised to find this forum and that you are still working on the Darwin sim stuff. Allmost thought it was a dead project. :D
-
Actuely, I was looking at new and intaresting videogames and came past one called "spore". Since I could not get this game, I went into the forums and someone mentioned Dawrwinbots2 as to be something like spore. So I came to have a look.
-
Wow, that's interesting.
-
I also bumped across this place while browsing spore (pc game) forums, someone linked this place and its got me hooked (for now, atleast)
-
Where is this spore forum?
-
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/spore/forum.html (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/spore/forum.html)
-
I actually tried to shoe horn some ALife stuff into Microsoft's .NET Terrarium, but they stopped supportting it and never released the source code, so I went looking for other ALife programs. Found Tierra, then Avida, even played with Tom Ray's new 3D sim stuff that looks a lot like Karl Sim's work from when he was at Connection Machines. Finially found DB off Google.
-
I voted for home of the underdogs but it might have been another shareware site. I was certainly searching for sims at the time. DB has stood head and shoulders above all the other AI sims I have tried.
-
I found DB in Home of the Underdogs, but my love of genetics is what made me download it.
-
Googling for alife.
-
googling for robotics
-
I used google and I sometimes spend hours trying to find the ultimate artificial life program. I've tried a lot of stuff. I found DarwinBots to be most interesting right now, dispite all the bugs. Hehe. I was surprised to find this forum and that you are still working on the Darwin sim stuff. Allmost thought it was a dead project.
I was searching a lot, too. There were a lot of artifical evo and alife link collections, but it seems they havent updated them for a lon g time now. Maybe this area is out of fashion.
I found most of the alife progs having all their advantages and disadvantages. They just simulate different aspects and mechanisms. Darwinbots, framsticks and darwinpond for example, are very entertaining and picturesque, but they are slow, tierra and avida are quick and show inventive evolution, but very incomprehensibly.
After all I'm glad that darwinbots is now so stabile and getting more and more versatile. Thanks for it!
-
I found it on wikipedia while searching A-life.
-
Googling for a good artificial life sim.
-
There's a link on wikipedia to the DarwinBots page on 'Open Source Games'.
-
I have found it at the home of the underdogs web site, if have seen some of the other A-life sims, but at this program you could too program your own bots and it works best compared to the ones I have seen.
-
I found out about it from a link posted by someone in a thread about Spore (which had long since gone off-topic) on a forum (which isn't about Spore).
The person's first post about it, where he didn't mention it by name, was a rant about animal rights activists beginning with "It just happens that I read a news article to the effect that at one of the conventions for this simulator, there were many protesters outside. Guess who they were?" - He believed the fake news story posted on these forums.
Someone asked what simulator he was talking about, and he named it and linked to the "news article" (and the link went right to the fake news post on these forums). He later realized the article was fake and went "Oops!".
I stuck a link to the DarwinBots site in my Firefox bookmarks toobar, and about a week or so later, downloaded DB to try it out.
-
That is the absolute best story for finding Darwinbots I've heard yet!
-
What story is that? Could you provide a link? I hope it's not about treating simulations like real life, because it's only data.
It reminds me of a friend of mine that was wondering what would happen to my bots when I said I had my computer turned off for maintanence for a few days, like they would die or something. I've heard people with Tamagotchi's get so attached they even have cemetaries for them. The same goes for people who complain about violent computer games. It's all just graphical data! There is nothing in there but zeros and ones!
-
What story is that? Could you provide a link?
Link (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=226&st=15entry1371222)
-
alife I searched alife ive looked at darwins pond antfarm gene pool 5 and all kinds but this is the best one so far
-
I found Darwin Bots when I poking around wikipedia.
-
I found DarwinBots while poking around Wikipedia too. I was randomly browsing through articles when I stumbled on free-ware games. From there I saw open source games and checked to see what I could find. I went through the list and took a look at the description of DarwinBots. I found it interesting so I downloaded the game.
-
Thanks to the power of Google I've found it:
Article (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=109&b=1&st=&p=&)
I remember this Come to think of it I served jail time
-
My friend told me about it In fact I thought that it was pretty stupid until he mentioned that you could program the bots
-
Wikipedia
-
I found it on wikipedia, searching for information on genetic algorithms. (A topic I became very interested in recently...)
-
Yay for wikipedia!
-
Hello Everyone! I am brand new to DB and this board. I found DB by Googling 'Artificial Life' . There was a page with quite a few links to try out. I've always been interested in AI but after recently reading 'Prey' by Michael Crichton I wanted to know more and see what I could find. I can't wait to try out DB.
-
Welcome
-
Welcome aboard. Personally I found the first 100 pages of 'Prey' to be only okay and the remainder to be downright terrible. The most interesting thing he can devise for intelligent nano-dust to do is emulate human form and run around in the desert? You've got to be kidding me.
-
Duh, human form is the pinnacle of perfect design. Why wouldn't intelligent nano-dust emulate human form and run around in the desert? I'm surprised you didn't figure that out on your own
-
Duh! The human species is quite weak, despite our successfulness. Any mammal in our own size is stronger than us. A chimpansee would win any wrestling match against a human. If it weren't for our brain we would most likely have gone extinct, which some scientists claim we were very close to just before our brains gained the ability for planning and abstractive thought. But most of all we're best at destroying ourselves and the planet. We're more like a cancerous desease than anything else. It could very well be we're just a temporary species on the planet, more like a short earth catastrophe, like the asteroid that whiped out the dinasaurs, just before it's time for evolution to start over.
-
Exactly! If that doesn't sound like the workings of a pinnacle species, I sure as heck don't know what does.
-
Sorry for getting philosophical in the wrong topic but...
Maybe pinnacle species have emerged before, that cause ecosystems to collapse and evolution to start over, if not something else like an asteroid does it. It's just sad that humans have the power to be guardians of the planet, to preserve the balance and diversity, and eventually have the ability to colonize space and take species with us, and maybe terraforming other planets. Humans me be the only hope for life on this planet to continue forever, somewhere else, because this planet will eventually be gone in the future anyway. Maybe without us the life on this planet would just be short waste of time between two eterneties.
-
Any mammal in our own size is stronger than us. A chimpansee would win any wrestling match against a human.
I agree to a large extent with your philopsophy and lament on the sorry degree to which humans are living up to their potential, but I wanted to point out that the statement above is a common misconception and largly incorrect. A human in top physical condition, as one would expect a chimp in the wild to be, is pound for pound on par with other primates w.r.t. phycisal strength. The misconception stems from the fact that most humans and thus the "average human" are not in top physical condition. The biology, the physcis of bone density and muscle development and such are basically identical in both species. There are differences in mechanics. We don't braceate and chimps are poor runners, but these differences aside, it's a myth that humans are some sort of weakling that only managed to survive through brain power. You can bet neanderthal's used brawn as well as brains to survive.
-
I meant Homo sapiens which is a separate branch from Neanderthals. But none of the other species on their way to become humans made it, like they were a bad evolutionary 'choice'. I would say they were all bad fit for the planet. Gorillas and chimpanses may be the closest to a human that works on this planet.
-
I suppose I could feel stupid for being on topic but it was by a rather odd course that I managed to discover these here forums. It all started on (last) weekend. It was a free weekend for Team Fortress 2. Knowing this was a good game and having a good computer, but a cheaper heart, I decided it best to enjoy it while it lasted and then be done. So I enjoyed myself and played on. Then it ended. Rather abrupt and I was not satiated. So instead I decided to load up one of my other steam games. What did I have to lose. I loaded up DefCon. While there I had such a good multiplayer diplomacy game I forgot while I had stopped playing the game. So I searched for some mods to see what was out there.
While on the DefCon forums I found something. A simple mod. It added units in the shape of people's avatars as sort of a community mod. Anyhow one of the units was the Darwinians in Darwinia. Now it was a nuclear sub like unit, and so when it only had 1 nuke left it rather resembled genitalia. Someone mad the comment that they had merely "evolved" the ability to reproduce and gave a link to an evo sim known as "Darwin's Pond." 'Twas a simple game but it reminded me how much I liked evolution sims. With this knowledge in mind, after playing I finally decided what to do and began the process of searching for something more complex.
In the end I found this by a Google search but the route there was rather long and detailed above.
Now that I have found this community I am determined to learn *DNA*. I have dabbled in Python, C++, and Visual Basic prior to this. I am now determined to create a creature for the leagues and participate in the community. My goal is to not download or copy other's code (even if it is available by author's consent) but purely develop my own. I've started with some tutorials and rather simple creatures and now look forward to advancing to something rather simple. My current goal is create a bot that is totally stationary, expending no energy until it find prey at which point it will track and devour the pray assuming it can get within a certain distance by a certain time.
I would be grateful for any basic help that can be provided, and would just generally like to say 'hi' to the community.
So Hello Community.
-
Heh, welcome. I've played everything you mentioned except Darwinia (demo slogged on my computer at the time). Fun games all
-
Thanks. Nice avatar by the way. I always was a fan of the Orz.
-
heh, I wonder how many other people here know what the Orz are (or maybe is? I think Orz is a single entity).
-
Hi,
Just joined. I have programmed Conways game of life several times (first on Commodore64 in basic )
Last year I found a very powerful version of the original idea, where organisms have a program that can mutate (Evolve 4.0, now at version 4.x) As it was too addicting, I threw it away after a couple of weeks, ..., now I've installed it again a couple of weeks ago, and it still is addicting
I've developed all kinds of creatures, or better, I've evolved them.
But what I was missing is the "on-line" exchange of creatures, while they are evolving.
I've searched everywhere, but afaik this is the only simulation that actually has it
I found you through wikipedia, through evolve link, and then overview of other sims
First thing I'm wondering about, ..., there seem to be little people online,
and what I'm also missing, not sure if it really is the case, ..., but the creatures that are exchanged online, are they the orginal version of how the bot was launched, or are they the mutated versions?
Wouldn't it make sense to exchange random species, in their mutated form?
-
Mutated bots are shared. Although bots can be marked as "do not mutate" if the author intended. There aren't many people on line because the connection isn't terribly stable (something weird with how Visual Basic closes connections or handles dropped packets or something, I think). Which is presently* be worked on by Eric, who's the main programmer at present.
*this is a relative term
-
I was looking on youtube for swarm intelligence videos and came across the Swarm vs Swarm (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVoGKkzNXKk) video, and was very interested from a programming standpoint.
-
I actually came to know about DB through Commander Keen; strangely, I met him through another friend, who coincidentally dabbed in DB for a while a few years ago but gave up on it.
After I became involved, I looked around for better alternatives, but didn't find any; at that point, I already had my own simulator up and running, but gave up on it due to my poor GUI programming skills.
btw. what species were used for Swarm vs. Swarm?
-
Wikipedia. I searched for some evolution simulators.
-
I was reminiscing about a game I used to have an the Atari ST where you could build robots by wiring up sensors to actuators and memory locations using a GUI and then they would battle each other in an arena, find their way out of mazes etc I think they also needed to eat ‘food’ and on the map they looked like a mini version your wiring configuration.
Then I was thinking about c-robots and terrarium, and did a search for a C# version of c-robots and came across darwinbots in a google search somewhere along the line, which then made me think about a few other Atari ST and DOS evolution sims I had seen along similar lines to sim life.
Anyway I loved the idea of combining the two, so after writeing a few basic bots, I got into doing the zerobot sims.
-
I used a java program for a while that let you program tanks to run in an arena. It was quite complex, with having to balance radar strength, movement efficiency, developing a way to tell walls apart from enemy tanks etc.
-
hi everyone! im a total noob to this so dont mind if I ask a lot of questions.I found darwinbots when I was looking at evolution sims on youtube!
-
I was reminiscing about a game I used to have an the Atari ST where you could build robots by wiring up sensors to actuators and memory locations using a GUI and then they would battle each other in an arena, find their way out of mazes etc I think they also needed to eat ‘food’ and on the map they looked like a mini version your wiring configuration.
Then I was thinking about c-robots and terrarium, and did a search for a C# version of c-robots and came across darwinbots in a google search somewhere along the line, which then made me think about a few other Atari ST and DOS evolution sims I had seen along similar lines to sim life.
Anyway I loved the idea of combining the two, so after writeing a few basic bots, I got into doing the zerobot sims.
Oh- you mean like braitenburg vehicles?
-
I was going through random Wikipedia articles
-
Heh I found DB on some list of programming games. Had played around with GunTactyx (Not sure I'm spelling it right) for an internship at a game company which had made a contest out of their open positions
Found it fun (Got the internship too) and wanted to see what else was out there. Found DB to be way more interesting because of the way DNA and the weaponry works (Anyone else I know thought the exact oposite due to the lack of 3D graphics and such, but they're all idiots anyway).
The list I found was poorly updated and half the links on it didn't work. And I'm not sure I would ever have found DB without that listing...
I think maybe we should try to get DB to pop up on more google searches. Maybe some nudy pics would help...
-
I'm going to try and blitz some ads once DB3 is mostly done. Maybe enter it in some indie game festival type contests as well.
Advertising right now would be counter productive, since DB2 is a little buggy still.
-
HELLO!!!!
Just registered, and wanted to say hi! Sorry for spamming... Keep up the good work!
ps how do you like my username? pretty sweet huh?
-
Welcome! and uh, yah, it's cool.. I kinda wish mine was more inventive...
-
I regularly go on Wikipedia to read Biology articles (and sometimes Chemistry, Physics, and any type of science). I've been trying to program a program that would simulate a single-celled organism, so that's how I found the article on DarwinBots. I have a lot of experience with programming so I hope I will be able to learn the language quickly.
-
If you have a programming background it shouldn't be too hard to pick up. It's basically a simple stack based assembly language.
Also feel free to go to the suggestions forum and start a thread about any aspect of the unicellular world we aren't simulating that you think we could.
-
I really love wikipedia. I'm really not good at programming, but if I like this, I'll make an effort
-
Hi there! I believe this may be my first post though I've been messing around with Darwinbots for a fair amount of time. I've always been interested in simulations of all kinds, and especially evolutionary simulators. I came across Darwinbots completely by accident while searching for evolutionary simulators online. I haven't had much of a chance up until now to run sims as I haven't had a dedicated computer to run it on (I feel my Alienware is sort of overkill for the task). Now however I am set up on a computational research project with my own dedicated computers that I can run sims whenever I like (outside research time obv ;) ). Anyway, looking forward to swapping stories and code with you all!
-
Google is your friend, kids.
-
What were you googling for?
-
yep, i got hooked on alife because of spore :)
-
I was really excited for it when it was in production, but the actual game wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. But I might be a jaded old man :P
-
well, we cant all have something as realistic as DB :D
-
Heloo everyone, i'm very happy to see such a dedicated community to this project. It's hard to believe how much work has been put to this brilliant little program, amazing work from numsgil and all the others. My story goes like this:
I am a big fan of Vsauce and i checked their new channel Vsauce2. There was a new video which showed collest screensavers you can have on PC. One of them was Breve. It was a nice program, but very limited to a new user who doesnt know programing languages. But i was fasinated by the possibilities such programs pose, so I, having an eager to find and learn more stumble across program called 3dvce made by Lee Graham. It was incredibly hard to find but after 3 days of intense web searching i find it. It was amazing, the creatures that computer created by himself were amazing, but the program was buggy and glichy, i wanted to find the creator of it, but appearantly he just dissapeared from the internet, no signs of him left. I realy tried to search any clues what happened to him, but i never could find anything... So I realised, I need to find an active community who is dedicated to such projects, searched the wikipedia pages for such projects, tried some programs that werent outdated, and i finaly found you guys, but lack of time, or mabie lazyness in me prevented me from experimenting, but i hope that will change, so quite a long first post for a user, but I think it is worth it, amazed by your work fellas,
-
Thanks to Habrahabr (http://habrahabr.ru/post/164711/ (http://habrahabr.ru/post/164711/))
-
Yea, Cjmax did some good work for us at Habra. Welcome to the team.
-
Honestly, heres a fun story to how I found it...
I had a really bad life sim on my computer, and it was pretty horrificly made, trying to be all cool looking, and not working well...but my Windows 7 had to be rebuilt by my dad, as I had just destroyed it over the years, so I got rid of that life sim, and googled life sims, found darwinbots purely cuz it has a coolish name.
BTW this forum really needs some theming!
-
Looked up things like BoxCar2D, thought I'd try it well I wait for Screeps(A programming MMORTS where you program your own units, pretty cool) to go on sale.
-
I've been looking at Screeps, too, trying to decide if I want to get that involved in to a programming game or not.
-
I was looking for DNA for GenePool 6! Then I followed the link on the forum! :)
In someways, DB is more difficult than Darwin Pond!
Thanks, Guys
Christopher Tarana