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« on: December 01, 2006, 06:11:31 AM »
I've often tried to think of ways of artificially (or perhaps semi-arbitrarily) increasing the fitness of a population of bots without editing dna, but this catastrophe-style method seems a bit harsh. Personally, I think bots have a hard enough time surviving as it is, and superior fitness is no guarantee of survival, so adding in new ways to kill them at this stage could be counter-productive, leading to selection of the lucky rather than the best. Oh, and yes, I do know that's how it works in real life!
My current leading idea, which is still in the early stages of consideration, is to scale each bot's point mutation rates by its unfitness (as fitness decreases, point mutation rates increase). Bots at the low-fitness end of the population get more point mutations, which will lead the bot to either break down altogether and die, or just maybe evolve that little step necessary to bump its fitness up.
Also under this scheme, the fittest bots will not point-mutate away from their current level of fitness. However, as the population's overall fitness increases the earlier high-fitness bots would find themselves dropping down the fitness tables for the population and start to mutate.
As I said, this idea hasn't been given my usual week of casual pondering before it gets its airing so please forgive any ragged edges!
Of course, the simplest method for artificially increasing the fitness would be to duplicate the current leading bot every 1000 cycles or so, but that could lead to bots losing their .repro commands when they become fit.