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Topics - Carlo

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Suggestions / Non-Determinstic Bot DNA flow
« on: May 29, 2005, 06:45:10 AM »
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First of all, I want to comment on Carlo's notion that we already have junk DNA.  This is not exactly true, becasue true junk DNA is not expressed at all, while any "junk code" that evolved bots acquire actually does affect bot's behaviour - at the very least it places some numbers on the stack, which may affect real genes later on.  So, when I am talking about junk DNA, I mean DNA that is not processed by program at all.
I really can't understand your point. Junk dna is present in DB in form of copies of genes which have been inactivated by mutations in the cond section. So it is really dna which is not processed at all. Take a look at some of an evolved dna files (for example FilansEvolved, though I don't know if it is in the standard distribution). It is full of genes which are never activated.


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duplicate gene >> turn one copy off >> mutate for a while>> turn it back on>> got a new protein.

But then I thought about it some more... In DBs we are forced to use relatively high mutation rates, becasue we don't have time to wait for millions of generations for something good to appear and our population size is several hunderds at most. At these mutation rates, any inactive gene will go into complete mess very quickly and is unlikely to become anything even remotely useful for a bot.

And this is true. This is why, for example, there was (is?) a cap at three conditions per gene in the mutation routines (that is, no mutation can insert new conditions in a gene which already has three conds). The less the conditions, the more probable a gene is executed; and when a gene is executed, selection works on it again, so that it stops accumulating junk. The idea was of making possible and fast this cycle:

working gene -> gene duplication -> gene inactivation -> mutation -> gene activation -> working gene

The less the time between gene inactivation and gene activation, the more probable to select interesting features.

I'd like to propose again the non deterministic execution of genes. This means that only one gene should be executed per cycle. The gene to execute would be chosen randomly among the active genes, those which have true conds for that cycle.
Why:

1) there would be no more the mixture of sequential and non sequential execution of genes. Position in dna would count no more.

2) no more the problem of genes writing values in output location, taking effect only in the next cycle. For example, now if you have a gene which passes information through a tie and at the same time writes a flag in a memory location to tell another gene that it has done its job, you have the problem that the flag is immediately readable by the other gene, but the information won't actually pass through the tie until the next cycle. The other gene is activated by the flag if it comes after in the dna; it will be activated only in the next cyle if it comes before in the dna (I hope you understand what I'm saying, today my english is a real shit :))

3) Number of genes would count. As only one gene is executed randomly at each cycle, if the frequent execution of a gene is really important then for a bot is convenient to have multiple working copies of that gene. It's like evolving reaction times: more prompt reaction to events means more copies of a gene.

4) multiple working copies of a gene means also multiple slightly different copies of that gene working. Now, if you have two working copies, slightly different, of the same gene, the one which comes last in the dna "wins"; with non-determinism, you'd have mixes of the different effects.

5) multiple working copies of genes means faster evolution: changing a working gene can result in a new behaviour without destroying the original behaviour (still produced by the copy).

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