Messages

31

Darwinbots3 / DB3 Application UI

« on: October 13, 2008, 08:52:57 AM »

Are we going to have multiple simulations in one instance of the application (makes it easy to do holding cells with different options then) or are we going to restrict one application instance to one simulation?

If we have multiple simulations we would need deal with multiple viewers and preference sets. We could create viewers that you can attach and detach from a simulation, and I guess a form with a list of preference sets that you can go and load, save, edit, and then some mechanism to assign a preference set to a simulation instance. Maybe have some options to duplicate them, so you can fire up another simulation with only some minor changes?

32

Suggestions / Mutation Protection method- in voting

« on: October 13, 2008, 05:28:21 AM »

Unfortunately I know very little about biology and I am new to darwinbots itself, but that’s never stopped me putting my 0.02 cents in before.

What is this feature trying to achieve? Is it protecting sub sets of hand coded DNA from changing in an otherwise mutating bot?

Or is it indented to allow a bot to evolve protection for vital areas of code mutating too often without needing to lower the simulation wide mutation rate?

If it’s the second, you might not want a bot to be able to evolve cost free protection since; it may appear to be slightly beneficial in the short term, stabilising a population by creating a larger proportion of fully functioning bots, especially if the simulation wide mutation rate is high, but might be damaging to the species in the long term, by drastically slowing its evolution.
Correct me if I am wrong but it feels like something that could accumulate and might not show its true detriment until many generations later by which time (by its very nature) would then be very hard for the bot to undo. If it had a cost from the start then each step would have to show real and immediate benefits in order for it to persist; only I am not sure that with costs attached it would show any tangible benefits in the short term, the benefits of this kind of targeted protection sound like long-term ones? Not forgetting that changes to things like feeding and reproduction will most likely become evolutionary dead-ends in very short order anyway.

33

Simulation Emporium / zerobot evolution

« on: October 13, 2008, 03:32:04 AM »

So, any summaries on how to get the best results for an evosim using a laptop with lowish performance and a problem with DB having an overflow error every hour or so?

I don't know, but I feel your pain, it really feels like something you want to just put on a spare pc and leave for a few days/weeks/months and come back to every so often to see how it’s getting on, but it doesn’t stay up and running for more than a day, sometimes only a few hours.
And on my last sim despite still having the option to ‘reset when all bots have died’ on, I came back to my pc to find it had crashed and the last 10 saves (30 mins apart) had no bots just veggies left.

Initially the bots would tie everything to everything and proliferate in a section of the sim. Local availability of food would collapse and so would the bot population. Now bots are more mobile or maybe just less fixed, so the effect has lessened. As for interesting behaviour I am still looking for a moment to go and watch if tie forming is conditional or not. Having evolved from a zerobot the code is unreadable to me.

Heh, mine have done exactly the same, they just all tie-up in one big webbed swarming mass as they munch though a field of veggies and then when they are done, as they die back some break-away and scatter to find more food. A few come across a new patch and it starts over.  Without a large map with multiple veggie patches the population just spikes and then crashes down to extinction.

I am trying to get the veggies to disperse more into lots of smaller clumps to encourage a foraging behaviour instead of one big feeding frenzy then relying on numbers and random luck that one of them comes across a new patch. And I have the auto costs set to the slowest increment so it tries to provide a very small but gradual increase in pressure with emphases on things like tie cost.

34

Darwinbots3 / April fools Easter egg

« on: October 10, 2008, 05:45:29 PM »

I think we should put an April fools Easter egg in, such that on the 1st of April a random evolved bot knocks on the screen, and says “Cogito, ergo sum” in a little speech bubble, then goes back to normal.

[Standard Intoxication Disclaimer] – I am currently drunk and wish to apologise for any degradation in the quality of this post including any statements, views or opinions held there within. Normal service will be resumed sometime around midday tomorrow. And if Google is reading this post: 4+2=42

35

Off Topic / What EricL really looks like

« on: October 08, 2008, 01:24:19 AM »

Heh, oh yeah Camelot was another one I tried, and Anarchy online, EQ2, Asheron's call, AC2 and Horizons. Went though a few, looking for something that held my attention like UO did. It could have been that UO was just my first MMO and it was all new I suppose but I think it was also that it had a lot more depth to it, They tried to create a virtual world and then build a game inside that, even with little things like the GM’s being portrayed as other powerful characters in the game, rather than outside it. And ok I never exactly went around harvesting wheat and baking bread, or sheering sheep and knitting clothing but the knowing the fact you could if you wanted too, still added something. Also not having come from a pen & paper background I liked the skill based approach added to the fact they didn’t expose the workings of the system, nothing had numbers on apart from your own skills, items or the evaluation of other players skills where qualified and quantified with textural descriptions.

Yeah, I really liked some of the ideas in ATITD2, only played the second one. I think going into that kind of detail would make a good bases for a crafting system in a more fully fleshed out MMO. I kept getting annoyed with the UI though.

Hah and same with WoW, I think I was just board with MMO’s at that point. In fact I think I only lasted 3 days of my trial.

36

Off Topic / What EricL really looks like

« on: October 07, 2008, 08:51:48 AM »

My favorite MMO of all time was Ultima Online.  Most other games I play for at most a month, and get bored, and never play again.  I played Ultima online, though, for probably a year all totalled, all at different times over the years.  I wish newer MMOs had followed that train of thought instead of Everquests'.

Another good MMO: Starport GE (plus it's free).  And last, A Tale in the Desert, which isn't free but it's very good.

Hah sorry to drudge up an old post, but I just saw this.

Hell yes, UO was my favourite MMO of all time I went through a phase of playing each new MMO trying to re-live my UO days but none came close, I have to admit everquest did eventually hold my interest for a few months but it took a while to get into after UO, and Eve Online got about 6 months subs from me spread over a number of years. But I played UO solidly for about 3 years, and made some very good friends. I no longer even try any of the new MMO’s they have all gone totally off track as far as I am concerned.

If I ever won the lottery, such that I could give up work, I would work on writing my own MMO and let people play for free and it would be very heavily influenced by UO and slightly by ATITD too.

37

Darwinbots3 / SVN Source

« on: October 06, 2008, 05:00:25 PM »

XBox live is the only way to network once your on the xbox, right? Last I heard XBox live had all kinds of limitations with XNA while they sorted out what sort of quality control they wanted to have.

Yes, and I have never tried doing any networking (or any other development for that matter) for the X-box, but something we do have in our favour is the complexity of the networking on this project is very simple compared to say a FPS with networked physics (which it seems is what everyone else is trying to use it for).

I think there's a more fundamental issue needing answering first. The core of Darwinbots is running bots, which are essentially plain text files that need to be loaded at sim start. How are we going to get the bots on to the XBOX at all? Do they network with the user's home computer? And then when you'll want to eventually transfer bots or whole sims back to your home computer, and how do you do that? It might be that there's no GUI at all, that you just set everything up through Visual Studio and export a settings file as part of the upload-to-the-xbox process.

Well, to be honest I don't yet know, I will try to find out some more, this was one of the reasons I was opting to put the x-box implementation aside for now but, keep everything vaguely compatible for when we come to look at it later on once we have something to play with. But I was imagining treating a bot not as a text file that you can do anything with (on the Xbox) but rather a binary piece of data like say a saved game or extra content, these could then be imported into the DB simulation (by CD or Xbox Live), where you could pick and choose what to include, set up the simulation from the available options and run it, then evolve and or interfere with the bots at a basic level, inserting or deleting individuals, even better if you had the holding cell idea in place.  There is perhaps even room for a very dumbed-down clumsy graphical bot editor (Take a zero bot and add units of prebuilt functionality from a selection) this in theory could all be networked over Xbox and Windows Live to link both X-box and Windows simulations in a similar way to what’s already been discussed for the pure windows client.  It should really be considered very much a gimmick though at the moment.

Shadow run is an example of a game that spans platforms from the X-box to Windows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun_(2007_video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_for_Windows_-_LIVE


Of course the other main option still open to us at this stage is if you don’t like the sound of all that; we can go back to an OpenGL implementation and span Windows and Linux (with mono).

38

Darwinbots3 / SVN Source

« on: October 06, 2008, 04:09:36 AM »

Well, for now until I get better acquainted with the project and while you’re still mulling over some of the fundamentals, I’ll work on some of the more generalised aspects of networking the project, and have a play with creating an GUI that can auto patch, load in other modules and connect to the network, browse a bestiary etc.

I think we will have to create two lightweight GUI  ‘clients’ one for windows and one for the X-box due to the differing requirements of the UI and features we could actually use, including differing approaches to networking, aka X-box Live (unless you’re a large company and can get on MS’s good side), everything behind these lightweight UI’s  would remain the same. For now we would just work on the Windows client and forget about the X-box, when we have something up and running, we can think about how an X-box version would work. Just keep everything in managed code.

I am still debating whether or not to create a custom XNA GUI or use ‘winforms’ with a handle for XNA, unfortunately doing so actually requires scraping a part of the XNA code base (the ’Game’ class) and requires you to write your own Graphics Device implementation.
Of course if you ever wanted to get this running on an X-box in any shape or form you have no choice but to write your own basic GUI anyway (There are number of GUI libraries out there though).

And on the subject of GUI’s I thought It would be cool to have separate mini environments with their own settings accessible from the main UI you could use as ‘holding cells’ So when you feel like playing god in a evo sim you can drag and drop some bots in to a ‘refugium’ to feed them up or get them to mate, or a ‘ring’ to have one-on-one fights.  

39

Darwinbots3 / 2D or 3D?

« on: October 03, 2008, 01:39:15 AM »

I also think I'm going to use isosceles trapezoids at first, instead of capsules.  It makes for much easier calculations.  And the two are very close in shape (the trapezoid will overestimate the size on the caps of the capsule essentially).

Now that sounds like a plan...
You don’t have to hit upon the perfect solution first time around, just implement something and play around with it. I like this idea as it keeps everything simple for now. And it’s even something I could live with long term.

Polygon_Capsules
[attachment=1028:Polygon_Capsules.png]

40

Darwinbots3 / New bot shape

« on: October 02, 2008, 03:09:13 PM »

Yes, angle is better. And then while is still has its ‘birth tie' the new bot could opt to keep it and would become multi-cellular or do nothing and it would just be a regular reproduction.

41

Darwinbots3 / New bot shape

« on: October 02, 2008, 02:43:16 PM »

I was thinking along the lines of some sort of extracellular matrix that bots use to construct themselves.  Maybe construct a regular lattice of cells and then kill off the extra ones through Apoptosis.

Doesn’t seem a lot of point in creating a lot of cells to then just kill off most of them..
But maybe the reproduction command can take multiple values from the stack, 1 for the nrg to give and 1 for distance or percentage of distance around the exterior from an arbitrary starting point?

42

Darwinbots3 / New bot shape

« on: October 02, 2008, 02:12:09 PM »

No limit on the number of joins.  And probably they can join any point to any point.  The hard part is figuring out how, in practice, the two bots are going to maneuver to create a joint.  Maybe something like a tether that one bot fires out and slowly pulls in.

Hmmm, wouldn’t be very precise or replicable then? I think it needs to be more mathematical in nature.

43

Darwinbots3 / New bot shape

« on: October 02, 2008, 01:57:38 PM »

heh, ok, and how many appendages can one cell have? Not just one for each end, or all you could create is a worm? But if more than one how does that work? Can I have them placed anywhere around the exterior of the cell?

[In Australian Accent] Can you guess what it is yet...?
Hmm.. I don’t suppose you had Rolf Harris in the US?
[attachment=1025:frog.png]

44

Darwinbots3 / New bot shape

« on: October 02, 2008, 07:11:58 AM »

Ok I am still not quite sure I understand how you envisage the cell joins in multibots, in particular cells of different shapes and sizes? Can you elaborate a bit on this?

[attachment=1018:cell_graphics_1.png]
[attachment=1019:Cell_graphics_2.png]
[attachment=1020:Cell_graphics_3.png]
[attachment=1021:Cell_graphics_4.png]

BTW, I am just using PowerPoint for my diagrams.

45

Darwinbots3 / 2D or 3D?

« on: October 02, 2008, 04:56:49 AM »

Yes, I'm done playing with my ideas for physics engines, for a while anyway.  Something more traditional is far easier to find and set up.

Well that’s the beauty of this modular approach