Messages

16

Darwinbots3 / DB3 Questions

« on: January 22, 2010, 06:10:58 PM »

Well, in real life the atrophy/exercise system that you intend to simulate really is there in more complex things. I also think it's going to be closer to a long-haul best than any bot is likely to achieve.

I think on a gut level I just don't like shifting control of a bot away from its DNA and into DB itself.

17

Darwinbots3 / DB3 Questions

« on: January 22, 2010, 07:59:04 AM »

Specialization here is less to do with how strong of a force you can produce, and more to do with how much that force costs you.

My statements were based on this assumption. How much an action costs limits how much the bot can perform that action. It may be that accelerating at full tilt has become an almost suicidal idea due to energy constraints and atrophy. Especially in situations involving reproduction, where a bot suddenly has much less energy to play around with than it did before.

18

Darwinbots3 / DB3 Questions

« on: January 21, 2010, 08:48:12 PM »

I have two gripes with this idea that aren't on your list:

1) In internet mode or in something like EricL's island sim, a bot may change environments and hence behave differently. The bot would be penalized for this.
2) A bot's behavior in non-critical situations can hamper it's ability to respond to critical ones.

An example of 2 would be a bot that runs from things that are bigger than it. If it becomes a big bertha for a while and then reproduces and loses the size advantage, the ability to run away well is lost for the original bot (and maybe even the offspring!). DB3 simply can't know beforehand what muscle distribution a bot will need to survive, so letting a bot make it's own informed guesses seems a lot more fair.

19

Darwinbots3 / DB3 Questions

« on: January 21, 2010, 11:27:51 AM »

If this training-based physical definition system is implemented, trying to design a bot that has a specific set of physical features would require a lot of strange behavioral contortions.

Perhaps we can borrow from life here and let DNA define physical characteristics in broad strokes, but severely limit the changes a bot can undergo while alive.

People are preprogrammed to grow to about a certain size, have a prescribed number of arms and legs, have hair in predetermined places. Using extreme effort, we can shrink or grow in size (to an extent), and train or atrophy our muscles, but these are programmed physical reactions rather than a global rule of life.

20

RANT / Capitalization of I

« on: January 21, 2010, 11:15:35 AM »

For me, forum word replacements are a bigger peeve than improper word use. They are never narrow enough to just accomplish the intended goal.

21

Darwinbots3 / codules

« on: January 16, 2010, 12:00:00 AM »

It's also possible for the logic in the codule to be affected by the value of a memory location altered by it. In this situation, more calls might do different things. For example:

customvariablename inc
5 customvariablename * store

22

Bot Tavern / The amazing wikibot

« on: December 18, 2009, 10:35:44 AM »

*.body 200 <
*.nrg 200 > and
20 .dn store
.backshot inc
618 .eye5dir .focuseye add store
-1 .shoot store
50 .strbody store
*.eyef 0 > and
*.in1 *.out2 = and
-6 .shoot store
20 .up store
*.refvelup .dx store
*.body 200 >=
*.nrg 20000 > and
.repro inc
swapbool
*.numties 0 = and
*.eye5 70 > and
.tie inc
swapbool
not
10 .up store
or

23

Bot Tavern / The amazing wikibot

« on: December 15, 2009, 02:04:07 AM »

*.body 200 <
*.nrg 200 > and
20 .dn store
.backshot inc
618 .eye5dir .focuseye add store
-1 .shoot store
50 .strbody store
*.eyef 0 > and
*.in1 *.out2 = and
-6 .shoot store
20 .up store
*.refvelup .dx store
*.body 200 >=
*.nrg 20000 > and
.repro inc
swapbool

24

Darwinbots3 / 2.5 Dimension mode?

« on: December 14, 2009, 12:25:32 PM »

If we make the cap one less than a prime number, the variable range with the rollover becomes a finite field  
In case that matters.

Well, 2520 is one less than 2521, which is a prime.  Does that count the domain [0, 2520] or [-2520, 2520]?

[0, 2520]
I can't think of a good reason we should care whether it makes a field or not, though.

25

Bot Tavern / The amazing wikibot

« on: December 14, 2009, 12:08:32 PM »

*.body 200 <
*.nrg 200 > and
20 .dn store
.backshot inc
618 .eye5dir .focuseye add store
-1 .shoot store
50 .strbody store
*.eyef 0 > and
*.in1 *.out2 = and
-6 .shoot store
20 .up store
*.refvelup .dx store

26

Bot Tavern / The amazing wikibot

« on: December 13, 2009, 01:19:55 PM »

[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']*.body 200 <
*.nrg 200 > and
20 .dn store
.backshot inc
618 .eye5dir .focuseye add store
-1 .shoot store
50 .strbody store
*.eyef 0 > and
*.in1 *.out2 = and

27

Darwinbots3 / 2.5 Dimension mode?

« on: December 13, 2009, 01:11:35 PM »

If we make the cap one less than a prime number, the variable range with the rollover becomes a finite field
In case that matters.

28

Darwinbots3 / 2.5 Dimension mode?

« on: December 12, 2009, 10:13:20 AM »

Yeah. Shoot should not end up as a wacky batch purpose variable like it did in DB2.
Info shots, energy shots, feeding shots, and killing shots are all fundamentally different things.

29

Bot Tavern / The amazing wikibot

« on: December 12, 2009, 10:01:53 AM »

[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']*.body 200 <
*.nrg 200 > and
20 .dn store
.backshot inc
618 .eye5dir .focuseye add store

30

Darwinbots3 / 2.5 Dimension mode?

« on: December 09, 2009, 03:56:21 AM »

How does a base 10 representation mean that the upper limit should be a power of 10?
We can still write the numbers in base 10 even if some strange number like 32768 is the cap.

Divisibility, though, is an argument I can stand behind. Having a number with very many divisors does make things pretty nice, but it's only a necessary concern if we are still going to restrict memory values to integers.

In the interest of making bot controls as close to analog as possible, floating point numbers have an advantage. Earlier I mentioned that .fixpos was a continuous function... this is because it has a discrete domain, just like .up does in the current implementation. All such functions are trivially continuous. The jump from (0 .up) to (1 .up) is just as arbitrary as the jump from (0.fixpos) to (1 .fixpos).