Messages

1

Announcements / Version 2.42.6 Released

« on: June 14, 2006, 06:22:59 PM »

Wow, great!

I'm totally obsessed with Darwinbots now. Work suffers

How do the day/night cycles interact with pond mode light gradients & nrg/cycle? Is there a description of this somewhere?

2

Simulation Emporium / Multicellular groups

« on: June 14, 2006, 03:06:49 PM »

So, in 2.4 the edge reproduction bug is fixed?

Because in 2.3.7, veggies on the edge reproduce on top of themselves. This is really annoying in pond mode plus day/night sims. Veggies on the edge in the daytime can bloom to the maximum veggie population in a 8-bot sized area is a very short period of time, which slows the sim to 1 cycle per second. It is impossible for the bots to clean this up, you have to turn off the sunlight and set the maximum veggie population to zero and wait for them to die off. Hopefully your bots can subsist on corpses while this is happening.

3

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Mutation Sims

« on: June 14, 2006, 01:04:45 PM »

I'm trying to understand game theory so as to help figure out what gives the bots the best payoff evolutionary speaking. From what I can tell a sort of Retaliator bot would be the best for mutation sims. If it is attacked by a canni it responds in kind, if the neighboring bot is peaceful so is it. The only problem is ID between a Canni attack and an accidental discharge, and attacking long enough to have an impact.

Endy

In my latest sim, which is pond mode with fixed alga in the top third, an unfixed alga that spawns at the top (and so floats to the bottom) & mobile I flammi as veggies and a DI to which I added float at birth, sink at age 2500 genes, the bots have evolved a retaliator strategy after at 3 million cycles. They only retaliate when bumped into hard, or hit with feeding shots during feeding. It has started to evolve away though, there is a more aggressive strain. They still don't chase other bots, but they sometimes attack them when they come too close.

This sim is really stable. The pop ranges from 70 - 150 following day night, with a much much flatter curve than that of the blooming fixed algae. A while back there was a mutation that was reproducing in the morning, and the bot population spikes were actually preceding the alga bloom spikes. It didn't last though.

4

Suggestions / A Few Suggestions

« on: June 13, 2006, 04:21:21 PM »

one way to add degeneracy would be to group instructions & sysvars into a manageable set of logical groups and for each group identify a semantic distance for all the other groups. then when mutating an instruction or sysvar, choose the new one from a bell curve distribution of the other groups based on their semantic distance from the group of the original instruction. With the most likely mutation being another instruction in the same group.

5

Newbie / Newbie having trouble with stability & autosaves

« on: June 12, 2006, 01:31:16 PM »

You can run two instances side by side however and use internet sharing to have them share bots between them.  This would also give you some topological isolation.  I want to make this super easy in coming versions....

That sounds like a good idea...so, I have to run an ftp server on localhost, yes? I have cygwin installed so I'll probably use that as I'm more familiar with unix than windows (I'm a mac guy originally).

Thanks for creating such a fun program!

6

Newbie / Newbie having trouble with stability & autosaves

« on: June 12, 2006, 01:25:46 PM »

I started a new sim, and now darwinbots has run for about 4 million cycles without a crash!

The difference was a LARGER field, so that the bots are drawn as colored blobs & not rings.

I also discovered that such a sim runs much much faster -- even with display turned off. I'm not sure why it would be faster with display turned off. But it is -- about twice as fast.

I also discovered that walls really slow things down. Why is this? I know that partly it's when there is an organism that likes to indefinetly attempt to tie-feed to them, thus creating a lot of ties.

Anyway, now I'm getting speeds as high as 60-70 cps with display turned off, when there is a wall & about 100 bots & 100 veggies. If I run without any walls, it can get as high as 100cps.

Cool.

I'm having a lot of fun playing with this. I haven't tried writing any bots yet, just trying to set up environments that result in evolution.

Huge thanks to everyone who has worked on this program! It's a lot of fun.

7

Bug reports / Mutations still weird

« on: June 12, 2006, 12:40:04 PM »

This sounds very much like the bug I fixed in 2.42.4 where the mutations details for long-run evo sims were exceeding 16k bytes, causing corrupted saved sim files the symptoms of which are to muck up mutation settings when re-loaded, if they re-load at all.  The details are here.  And also here.

But I also have the bug if I insert a saved organism into a running sim. The inserted organism never mutates. I have to copy & save it's dna, add that to the setup, and insert it that way. Then it will mutate.

8

Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims / Its might really be good to have sexrepro

« on: June 12, 2006, 11:33:21 AM »

But how to choose which two robots to mix?

That is the question.

Should one robot shoot a virus like sperm package to force another bot to reproduce and mix the DNA?

Should it shoot another bot to elicit a sperm package back from the other bot (like a -2 shot) then reproduce itself.

Should the bots be tied together to mix their DNA into a combined offspring?

The existing .sexrepro sysvar attempts to mix the DNA of the bot using it, with the DNA of the closest bot in physical space without any actual contact being made between then.
It has never worked all that well.

How about something like fish do:

- a bot can make an egg, which is the same as a child except a percentage of nrg can be put into shell.

- everything that involves external interaction is disabled in an egg (shooting, tieing, moving, feeding). In exchange, it has reduced cost for everything else & possibly an nrg bonus. However the egg can see. This allows hatching ready for external conditions.

- a bot can fertilize an egg through a tie and/or shot

- a fertilized egg gets dna that combines egg & fertilizer's dna through one of several algorithms
    -- random pairwise choosing, gene-by-gene
    -- random split of dna
    -- randomly choose one dna & some kind of mechanism for swapping in "dominant" genes from the other. "Dominant" could be implemented by a command in the gene.

- egg & fertilizer can vote on which algorithm to use. Egg's vote gets priority

- an egg knows when it's being fertilized and can reject being fertilized

- egg can control how soon after fertilization it hatches

9

Bug reports / Mutations still weird

« on: June 11, 2006, 10:02:39 AM »

I also get this bug when loading an autosaved file and running it in 2.37.6.

10

Newbie / Newbie having trouble with stability & autosaves

« on: June 11, 2006, 09:56:10 AM »

Hi, my name is Michael. I found darwinbots because I was interested in checking out genetic programming.

I have an amd dual core machine, and I am running Windows XP64.

I have a lot of crashes with 2.37.6 (it crashes about once every 1.5-2 hours). Usually overflow errors, once a complete machine crash.

Also I am unable to open most autosave files. The program either hangs or crashes. The few that do open have no graphic details (but this is fixed by turning all the graphics options on and back on again).

Worse is that a simulation that was opened from autosave runs slower and reports more total objects than it should.

Is it possible all these problems are related to running on XP 64? Is anyone else using darwinbots on XP 64?

Also, how fast should it be (for example on 16000 x 12000 I get speeds from 8 cps to 40cps depending on population, with fast mode & flicker mode turned on. Darwinbots only ever uses 50% cpu -- is there a way to make it use more? The load seems to distribute over both cores, so I don't think it is because it is bound to a single core.