Messages

16

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Re: Randombot evolution sim

« on: April 15, 2012, 03:44:25 PM »

Cheers for the advice guys.  Currently I'm ridiculously busy with my Masters dissertation, but once I've got my final year out of the way I'll have a lot more free time to play with this.

Speaking of your "calm before the storm" Nums, the massive shooter which I posted a while ago has survived all this time, has made the shoot gene dormant, re-started reproduction and its population has exploded.  More excitingly, I am seeing a lot of promising behaviour, including periodic (not cancerous as far as I can tell) reproduction, periodic (but unaimed) shooting, periodic and random bursts of movement, and for some reason some of them seem to have activated their .fixed memory location.  I will be keeping a close eye on things now to see what develops...

17

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Re: Randombot evolution sim

« on: April 10, 2012, 06:01:45 PM »

Sorry, I should have explained - these bots are far from adapting to their environment.  The behaviours seen here are merely due to random mutation - unless they develop some way of reproducing sensibly, this behaviour is null and void.

One thing that the growing huge does mean though is that it will greatly increase their longevity, which will at least give them more of a chance to evolve other behaviours including reproduction.  We'll see.

I just posted the bots out of curiosity as to how the behaviours they have developed work, none of them will be at all successful in their present condition.

18

Darwinbots3 / Re: Multi-core support?

« on: April 10, 2012, 05:56:32 PM »

Brilliant.  Hopefully by then I'll have the money to create a dedicated PC for DB.  Looking forward to it guys!

19

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Re: Randombot evolution sim

« on: April 10, 2012, 05:06:55 PM »

If you plan on leaving them on for a while, it's sometimes better to just buy a new stripped down computer with a core i7, in terms of the energy consumption.  Each DB instance is single threaded, but you can run multiple instances simultaneously.  So one of the new 6 core processors can run 12 instances (6 cores with hyperthreading = 12 hardware threads) pretty effectively.

In an ideal world, this is precisely what I'd do.  Sadly at this stage in my life I'm an impoverished student, so it'll be a while before I can just fork out on a hobby number cruncher xD

If they don't get a lot of nrg from being a veggy, they should learn to feed as well, to supplement their meager nrg income.  Pretty soon after that all the non feeding vegs should get eaten.  Then you lower the veggy feeding some more, and introduce dumb bots to feed the animals by getting eaten.  You keep lowering the veg nrg until you can turn it off entirely.  Then start the sim with that species not marked as vegs, and you can introduce in smarter and smarter vegs.

Ok I get where you're coming from with that - how do you give them a meagre nrg income? I have my veg feeding at 1 nrg per kilobody point, and anything withat least a few hundred body seems to be doing fine - in fact most of them have 32000 nrg - that is until the age cost catches up with them and kills them off.

Heh, that's a funny way to evolve locomotion.

I don't think I'll credit them with having evolved this on purpose to get around, but I suppose there's the possibility that a bot might use this as a means of locomotion if movement was exceptionally costly and body wasn't an issue...

Incidentally, the latest update: so far there is no sign of sensible reproduction evolving, however I feel we are getting closer.  I have attached a few curiositied which have mutated along the way.  The first is a robot that compulsively ties to anything in front of it.  It doesn't do anythig further, but it's has a little cluster of other bots attached to it now, and it's at least a step in the right direction.
The second is a massive (32000 body) bot which constantly shoots (I'm not sure what it shoots either), but from the once-over I've given its DNA, I can't work out why it shoots constantly, nor why it's so big.
The final curiosity is another behemoth (32000 body) which again I haven't been able to ascertain the reason for its massive size.  Please feel free to pick apart the coding for each and discuss, I'd be interested to know what makes these guys tick.
I find the discovery of these behaviours heartening - for a start it shows that a wide variety of interesting behaviour is possible from these bots, and secondly, all I need is for one of them to start reproducing again, and I could have the makings of a rudimentary self-sufficient bot!

20

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Re: Randombot evolution sim

« on: April 05, 2012, 01:45:24 PM »

There are so many different ways to induce evolution in the bots... I think I'm going to have to start a charity where people donate their old computers to me so that I can use them for extra processing power.  Try a different sim setup on each one and see how things develop.

That does sound like an interesting use of cancerous growth, and I can see how that would stay stable - you end up with a sort of grass effect, fields of veg grow, bots feeding from it gain only a little energy per veg, so must eat a lot of them.  I rather like that idea actually, seems a little more reminiscent of real veg and herbivores.

I'm not sure I follow your approach to creating an animal bot though - if you make all the bots veg, won't that promote veg behaviour? If a bot can get enough energy just by sitting around and (for want of a better word) vegitating, what evolutionary advantage does moving around and shooting give?

Took a peek at my sim just now, I noticed that the constant reproduction was causing bots to propel themselves along, creating a 1% bot each cycle which immediately died from lack of energy.  The poiffs of exploding bots make it look like a smoke trail for the one that's reproducing 

21

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Re: Randombot evolution sim

« on: April 05, 2012, 09:41:59 AM »

Milestone 1

Right, here is where I draw the line for the first milestone of this project.  Using randombots, I have successfully "evolved" a bot capable of reproduction.  This is being done by a .repro inc command buried in the random integers. This causes a cancerous reproduction pattern, where the bots attempt to reproduce every single cycle.

My next step will be to attempt to breed out this cancerous growth, giving something a little more controlled.  To do this, I will set energy to be distributed per kilobody point, which favours sensible veggies.  Costs will be set to F1 default, but with age cost set to 0.1, which will also discourage cancerous growth, and veggies repopulation threshold will be set to 100.  From previous dabblings with these settings, I have seen that the veggies that survive are the ones that evolve to turn off the area of code which allows them to reproduce.  Therefore after a while of cancerous growth, I will end up with 100 non-reproducing veggies, however most, if not all, will still posess the genetic code enabling them to do so.  Then, it's a simple matter of waiting for the point mutations to evolve a sensible control for the reproduction.

The F1 default costs will provide an evolutionary drive towards a sensible reproduction pattern for another reason as well.  Eventually, the Age cost will outstrip the amount of energy being collected by the bot, and it will begin to lose energy.  Therefore, each bot has a lifespan, and if it does not develop a sensible method of evolution in that time (and with age cost at 0.1, that's still 10 gigacycles per 1 energy) then both it and its genetic code dies.  Sort of a brute-force method, but I'm pretty sure it should yield results eventually.  If a veggie dies, it is replaced by a brand new cancerous veg, which will eventually simmer down into something useful again.  And so the cycle continues...

If you have any suggestions, please let me know and I will give them due consideration.  Most of my methods are hypothesis and a little trial and error, so if you have any useful experience, I'd love to hear it.  Also, as I mentioned above, does anyone know how to work pondmode, because I've had no luck so far.  I'd like to use it later.

I get the feeling I need a successful veg before I can start evolving something that can feed on veg...

22

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Re: Randombot evolution sim

« on: April 05, 2012, 08:54:31 AM »

Haha I was a little confused - I assumed it was just a server error.  Yeah, I can't really remember what it was I wrote now...when I feel up to the task of re-writing my essay I will do

In the meantime, I've decided to work on one thing at a time.  Currently, I'm setting up the sim to instead focus on stabilising the veggy version of my evobot, i.e. evolving out the current cancerous nature.  I will make a new topic with what I've achieved so far and where I'm going with it next.  Incidentally, I want to evolve interesting veggy behaviour so I need an interesting environment - does anyone know how to provide good settings for pondmode?  All the permutations I've tried dont seem to make any difference.  I want to have the veggies get enough energy if they remain in the upper part of the pond, but if they sink to the bottom they die.  I've tried light intensity 1 and sediment level 20 but even that doesn't seem to stop the ones at the bottom getting more than enough energy.  Also I set nrg per cycle to 0 so they were only getting energy from the pondmode source.

23

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Re: Randombot evolution sim

« on: April 04, 2012, 06:24:00 AM »

Hey, so far nothing interesting to report, the sim has restarted a couple of times due to all bots dying out, but otherwise all quiet.

In the current version of the sim, all animal reproducers have died out due to cancerous growth and no incoming energy, two veggies have survived due to mutation which has rendered the reproduction gene dormant, and the randombots are just sitting there slowly mutating and running out of energy.

As suggested I am using nrg per kilobody point to discourage cancerous veg, and I have costs on in order to make finding food a priority.  I know that it would probably be in my better interest to try to keep the bots alive, however I see no good way of doing that save forcing them to evolve the necessary code.  If I set them as autotroph or create a feederbot to feed them, they will become lazy and just let that happen.  Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind...

I am going to adjust the sim to repopulate veggies if the population falls below 20.  That should give them plenty of chances to evolve into something a little more sensible, while keeping a decent supply of food around in case anything else felt like evolving...

I'll post the A1 code next time I get the chance, there's really not very much to see though, just a random string of numbers and commands with 58 .repro inc stuck in there somewhere.

Watch this space...

24

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Randombot evolution sim

« on: March 28, 2012, 11:10:29 AM »

The original post from this topic was modified by a moderator (not naming any names! ), and I can't be bothered to re-write the whole essay so here's the gist.

I set up an evo sim with 100 1024bit randombots (1024 random integers between 1 and 1000), set as autotroph and left to mutate the ability to reproduce.

I used random integers instead of zeros because I noticed that point mutation only mutates numbers by small amounts, meaning that 1) even if luck was on our side and the number mutated only in the right direction, it would take a long time to reach 300, and 2) behaviour evolved would most likely only use the low array areas, as it becomes exponentally less likely for the higher array areas to be reached.  Using random integers means that the chances of any array location being used are equal.

After a surprisingly short number of cycles, the command .repro inc appeared, causing a cancerous reproduction pattern.  Please see further on for the next step.

25

Darwinbots3 / Multi-core support?

« on: March 28, 2012, 10:35:45 AM »

Hey guys,
I'm hoping DB3 is still in the works!  I would offer to help out, but currently university degree must take precedence.  Also I hear that it is currently a little difficult for people to just jump in at present.

My question was just regarding whether DB3 would feature multi-core processor support.  While my i7 runs sims a lot faster than any of the single-core PCs I've been using, I notice that DB2 is still only utilising one core's worth (16%) of the available processing power.

I know that coding for multi-core processors is a lot more difficult, as jobs have to be divided between available cores, but each bot script can be thought of as a job in itself, and I would have thought that if you were able to specify somewhere in the settings the number of cores you would like to utilise, it shouldn't be too difficult to get to program to divide running of the scripts evenly across the processors.

Seeing as future technology seems to be moving towards more and more cores, this seems like a sensible avenue to explore.

If you're feeling really adventurous, DB doesn't really need a lot of graphics processing, so you could look into GPU support too.  That would really give sims a turbo boost!

26

Newbie / Re: How did you find DarwinBots?

« on: October 19, 2011, 12:15:52 PM »

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!