22
« on: October 23, 2007, 05:21:46 PM »
First off, I think autocosts are wonderful feature and I've so far used it in my every sim. However, I think it should be used carefully.
A couple of my first evosims all evolved conditionless reproduction very quickly, it probably spread at the first time repro-gene mutated. After some pondering on why that happened, I realized that I had set autocost sensitivity pretty high, in the center section of the slider. Because a quick (or continous) reproducer increases population extremely fast, costx skyrockets. Quick reproducers get more coverage to find energy to fight rising costs than their slower cousins and their generation time is shorter allowing faster mutation to cope with the changes. (By the way, don't bacteria too benefit from short generation times in exterme conditions?). As this happened, the original strain died out. Now that I've set sensivity lower (the lowest possible) in my never sims none of this has happened. The bots still hold on to conditional reproducing after 1000 generations and nearly 500 mutations in the latest sim.
Another thing that I thought of, is that doesn't autocost hamper adaptation? For example: When a bot mutates in a way that allows it to save energy and not to lose it's effectiveness it probably has more energy for reproducing, resulting in higher population. But as population rises, so do the costs so that the mutation loses much of it's significance. My point is, doesn't that cut "the reward" for adapting to situations compared to sims where costs stay the same?
One effect this has is that program puts constant evolutionary pressure on saving more energy. In real life (as far as I know), better times that come with higher population size, allow DNA to be more sparing with energy - or food or whatever - and when times are hard, there's pressure to use energy more effectively. In darwinbots this could mean when there's been some beneficial mutations evolving new, more complex features could be easier to develop than "normally". Reason for this being that some of more advanced actions (think viruses or tie feeding) require a number of stores, which are not all directly useful.
I'll stop now or I'll ramble on forever.
Any thougths?