Messages

1

Newbie / Newb question about mutation

« on: January 19, 2008, 03:18:35 PM »

Yes I've looked at individual bots' mutations via their properties.  It just seems that very few of the bots I look at have any mutations at all.  This is probably because I'm impatient and haven't run the sim long enough to generate many mutations.  I'm afraid of turning up the mutations too high, however, because it seems to me that that would generate too many mutations and either kill off too many bots or destroy the selection.  Anyway, DB has capture my interests so I'll most likely become a consistant poster once I get myself figured through it.

2

Newbie / Newb question about mutation

« on: January 19, 2008, 02:12:27 PM »

Wow, its amazing the difference some of those settings makes.  I'm also very impressed with how helpful this community is.  But I'm curious.  Is there a way to pause the simulation and find the most mutated surviving individual?  I doubt there is because there is little use for such a feature but I'm just finding it difficult to isolate mutated individuals just to observe the changes.

3

Newbie / Newb question about mutation

« on: January 19, 2008, 11:32:30 AM »

Thats pretty ingenious then.  I've been running a sim with Alga_minimalis and Animal_minimalis for a while and trying to find mutated individuals to inspect, but I haven't been very successful.  But this explanation helps a lot.

One more question though.  When the total number of bots begins to get really high, the cycles/sec dramatically decreases for obvious reasons.  I've tried turning off the video display to help it run faster but I'm still getting somewhere around 0.1 cycles/sec.  It's an old machine but its the only one I can really afford to have dedicated.  So is there anything else I can be doing to speed it up?

4

Newbie / Newb question about mutation

« on: January 19, 2008, 12:23:38 AM »

Hello,

I've just started with DB and I'm really intrigued by it.  But I'm confused by the concept behind these mutations.  I'm a biochemist with a specialization in bioinformatics so I understand the concept of mutation and evolutionary modeling, but I'm interested in exactly what is taking place.  When I see a point mutation is that referring to the change of one character in the code that defines the organism's DNA?  If so, how does this avoid making the code invalid?  I guess the simplest way to ask my question is this:

If I allow an organism to continue for a period of time and it mutates and I save its DNA code and open it in a text editor next to the original non-mutated DNA code, what difference would I see?  Would single integers be changed?  Or would entire genes be rearranged?