Topics

1

Suggestions / Gene structure - cond start stop

« on: November 01, 2007, 10:57:43 PM »

I've been thinking about the structure of genes.

The cond-start-stop structure is very fragile, practically any mutation in the wrong place will break it completely. It is also prohibitively difficult to evolve naturally - what's the chance a cond instruction will appear before a condition to evaluate, then a start will appear, then an appropriate action will evolve with a stop at the end? Vanishingly small.

So why not simplify it?

Remove cond and start.

Change the way genes are handled so that only stop is used.

Make the stop command define the end of a gene. So from the start of the genome to the first stop is the first gene. From the first stop to the second stop is the second gene. From the last stop to the end of the genome is the last gene. Make no stop at all mean the entire genome is one gene.

But that would not allow us to have conditional genes. So I got to thinking - if the gene is defined by the stop command at the end, why not make the condition the last part of the gene?

The way I envision this working is like this: Fire the gene speculatively, calculating the changes to the memory locations, but don't commit them to the simulation. If the value on top of the stack when stop is reached is greater than zero, commit the results to the sim. If not, discard them.

2

Bugs and fixes / "Best bot" in veggie-only sims

« on: November 28, 2006, 08:09:05 AM »

The "Best bot" button doesn't work in veggie-only sims. Which is understandable, I guess given the heterotroph orientation of the program, but if you hit "best bot" then try to call up Robot Info, the program crashes.

3

Suggestions / Cost multiplier slider

« on: November 28, 2006, 08:05:26 AM »

Can we have a way to manually set the costX for a sim? I'd like to be able to start a sim off with super-low costs and then gradually increase it to try and temper some bots that can survive costs. The current way involves changing the vaules in a load of text boxes, but if there was just a simple slider that we could drag to increase or decrease costs it would be a lot easier.

4

Suggestions / DB Screensaver?

« on: November 24, 2006, 08:40:27 AM »

Just a random thought that popped into my head literally seconds ago: DB would make a great screensaver if you took away the toolbars at the top and just maximised the sim area. Any chance?

5

Suggestions / "Rain"

« on: November 22, 2006, 10:47:09 AM »

If energy (or, say, photons for plants) is introduced into a sim in the form of a constant drizzle of something like shots which start at the top of the screen, move directly downwards and give energy to the first bot they touch, that might encourage more interesting plant evolution. The current closest equivalent, pond mode, does not allow for "shadows" and tactics for stealing "light" from competitors. This way would encourage plants to grow upwards and outwards, and a multibot would have a definitive advantage over a singleton - a multibot could cover a larger area and grow into a taller structure than a singleton confined to rolling around the "floor". The problem I have always had with pond mode is that the lower regions are always so energy poor that if gravity is introduced the sim is so energy poor little happens. This way, even bots at the bottom of the screen get a decent energy input... as long as there's nothing above it.

This post was rushed because I'm about to leave work, but the idea behind it wasn't

6

Newbie / What is "Amplification"?

« on: November 16, 2006, 08:13:11 AM »

In a super-long-term sim I've seen "Delta mutations changed Amplification from X to Y" a couple of times, but never before or since. What is this "Amplification"?

7

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Zerobot sims

« on: November 15, 2006, 05:26:57 AM »

I've been running some zerobot sims for a while now and I can't say I've actually managed to get much in the way of evolved useful characteristics. Apart from the one time a bot managed to place its entire dna into a virus and transfer about 700 copies into a single veggie, which then took over the sim...

Anyone else managed to get anything interesting or useful? How about we collaborate a bit and if you get a viable bot (even mildly!) on a zerobot sim, post the bot here and perhaps us other zerobot-simmers can run sims on that bot.

8

Newbie / Can DB actually open a .dbo file?

« on: October 30, 2006, 10:02:23 AM »

Seems like a silly question to me, but its stumped me. I ran a week-long zerobot sim with regular saves of the "best" bot. Naturally the program gave an "out of memory" error and crashed, leaving me with a tantalisingly frozen screen listing a non-zero number of births.

Aha! I thought, I shall simply start a new sim with the "best bot" just before the sim crashed! Unfortunately, I can't find a way for DB to import anything but .txt or .org files, when the "best bot" is saved as a .dbo file.

Am I just being thick?

9

Suggestions / Repopulating/Refreshing non-Veggies

« on: September 12, 2006, 06:12:49 AM »

It seems to be a fairly common theme on this board that evolution sims end up with fit bots evolving away from fitness. I believe this to be at least partly because all the bots are mutating simultaneously - eventually mutations will tend to crunch genes so that the bots are not competitive against the original "pure" genome, but mutations will also ensure that there are no "pure" bots left to compete against, so the standard of competition is reduced.

One way I've found to at least temporarily stave off this tendency is to reintroduce small populations of "pure" unmutated bots from time to time using the Bot Add tool. This ensures that the evolved descendants are forced to be competitive against the original genome, leading to a (slow) general trend towards improvement - a bot which is less competitive than its ancestors will be at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately this can't work for sims I leave running while I am out at work!

Would it be possible to introduce a mechanism to do this automatically? Along the lines of having options to reintroduce a customisable quantity of original-genome bots at a customisable interval?