Darwinbots Forum

Bots and Simulations => Evolution and Internet Sharing Sims => Topic started by: EricL on January 20, 2007, 03:46:48 PM

Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on January 20, 2007, 03:46:48 PM
I will buy the first person who can convince me they have evolved an organism that uses condtional logic from a zero bot ancestor a year's subscription to Scientific American (or your favorite magazine of comperable subscription cost).  Price of delivery to non-US addresses included.

Rules:

Must be descended from a 0 bot (any length)

No contamination from human authored DNA.  (If you use veggies with enabled DNA in your breeding sim, they must be restricted from mutating else they infect your bots with a virus containing their own human authored DNA).

Must demonstrate 'true' conditional logic I.e. they must 'delibertly' exhibit different behaviour under different circumstances.  Winning examples might include tracking or targeting another bot, velocity matching with another bot, stopping within proximity of another bot (and starting again if the bot disappears), choosing different speeds under different nrg or environmental conditions, etc.

There is no requirement that bots actually evolve use of the cond statement or traditional gene structure.

Examples which do not qualify include (but are not limited to) useful but non-conditional cyclic or periodic behaviour (e.g. reproducing, shooting, turning every N cycles).  To win, your bot must have evolved DNA which makes a decision based upon some environmental input.

For this first contest, I will allow trigger logic such as reproduction when nrg is above a certain level.  The logic must truly be conditional however and must be present in the DNA I.e. a bot which attempts to reproduce every cycle but only does so when it has body > 2 becuase the simulator requires this does not count.

To win, you must post a sim which demonstrates the claimed behaviour, provide an explanation and reverse engineer the relevant evolved DNA.

Good luck!
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Jez on January 20, 2007, 10:59:52 PM
V nice!

Does that mean you will open a bestiary/zerobot bit of the forum for me to record posted efforts?
I only have two by MaN's atm but you never know... (point out any I have missed etc etc)

How can we tell if a ZB is true or contaminated? (beyond author honesty) I would love to see this hard coded in some way (including a default enviroment that ZB's should aim for), ZB's are very much in line with what Carlo originally intended!
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on January 21, 2007, 01:22:19 PM
Let's have people post submissions for the prize as a reply on this topic.  In fact, let's make that a requirement.  A link to another topic in the reply is fine, but no changes to the submission once the reply is made on this topic.  Submissions will be taken in order, thus if there are multiple entries, the first one to reply on this topic with a winning entry will be the winner (though if there are multiple, unrelated winning submissions with a few days of each other, I will consider awarding multiple prizes).

If we need a besatiary/zerbot topic area in general, I would be happy to create it.

I have no concerns regarding the honesty and integrity of everyone in this forum.  A certain kind of natural selection is in operation.

I designate myself as the finial voice (this time) on inadvertant contamination or rules technicalities, though opinions from the peanut gallery will be given strong consideration.  For example, Maca's Five-0 zerobots are descended from a first ancestor which contained a start and an end.  While technically a violation of the rules (starting bots should be all 0's and nothing else) I deem descendents from this common ancestor to be elligable for the prize (this time).

Regarding default ZB environments, that is a complex subject which deserves it's own topic.  In my opinion, it is possible to evolve winners using radically different environments and the environments themselves may need to be modified by the human during different breeding stages to provide new and different selection pressures as evolution proceeds.  Thus, for the contest, any environment may be used and environments may be changed as deemed necessary along the way by the human subject to the rules above (in particular, any organism with hand authored DNA added to the sim as part of the enviroment must have mutations disabled).
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on January 21, 2007, 11:29:32 PM
I can attest that a static environment with modest costs at the beginning isn't the way to go.  I have a sim in the hundreds of millions of cycles and nothing noteworthy.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: MacadamiaNuts on February 02, 2007, 04:05:59 PM
Would any amount of repeats of this:

0 499 999
999 499 0

qualify as a valid "zerobot"? Those are unused sysvars, as far as I know, and mutations would spread better through the whole sysvar range instead of favouring the lower values.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on February 02, 2007, 09:15:14 PM
Fine with me.  A vector of random numbers would also be okay.  Any set of starting numbers would be fine as long as the entropy does not differ significantly from that of a pure zerobot.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Sprotiel on February 03, 2007, 01:07:52 PM
Quote from: EricL
Fine with me.  A vector of random numbers would also be okay.  Any set of starting numbers would be fine as long as the entropy does not differ significantly from that of a pure zerobot.
Entropy is certainly not a relevant characteristics: a pure zerobot has minimal entropy, while a purely random genome has maximal entropy. Intuitively, both should be admissible because they incorporate no relevant information wrt. bot behaviour and evolution.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on February 03, 2007, 03:45:42 PM
Sorry, I should have said they must have similar relevant information entropy (otherwise known as Kullback–Leibler divergence) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback-Leibler_divergence) relative to the set of all "functional" bots.

You are corret to say the entropy of a random sequence is higher than a sequence of all zeros relative to the space of all possible seqeunces, but the set of all possible sequences is not the relevant set we care about.  A zerobot and a random bot both have similar information entropy relative to the set of all functional bots (bots that do something interesting including all hand authored bots).  Said another way, their information content is zero or nearly so relative to bots that do something interesting.

I think the root of the issue is that in a evolutionary system, the definition of "organized" is not the same as "statistically improbable".  A zerobot is statistically improbable but as far as DB is concerned, it is unorganized and thus exhibits high relevant entropy.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Endy on February 03, 2007, 10:50:49 PM
Quote
I can attest that a static environment with modest costs at the beginning isn't the way to go. I have a sim in the hundreds of millions of cycles and nothing noteworthy.

I've gotten decent results by mixing up the enviroments. First I started off with a gravity/brownian motion enviroment, with veggies giving free energy shots. As bots learned to feed/repro I installed standard veggies. As the bots adapted and learned to move to some extent, I lessened the amount of gravity and brownian motion in the sim.

Evolution seems to work best if it has something to work on. The bots need to have increasingly harder challenges to test their mettle against.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on February 05, 2007, 09:37:00 PM
Quote from: Endy
Evolution seems to work best if it has something to work on. The bots need to have increasingly harder challenges to test their mettle against.

I'll second that.  Evolution doesn't like to make progress, you have to drag it kicking and screaming to the next plateau.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on February 05, 2007, 09:52:05 PM
Quote from: Endy
Evolution seems to work best if it has something to work on. The bots need to have increasingly harder challenges to test their mettle against.
I will third that.  But I will also point out that the any measure of evolution that uses terms such as 'progress' or 'better' begs the question as to what external frame of reference is being used to measure it.  Humans tend to judge things in human terms and therefor tend to (incorrectly) ascribe some sort of built-in goal or relentless march towards ever increasing complexity to evolution.  Humans often think that becoming more human-like is somehow 'better' or represents 'progress' and thus we use terms like 'primitive' to refer to less complex organisms around us.  Of course, such perspectives are flawed.  Evolution can produce complexity to be sure, but only if selection favors complexity.  This of course, is the exact point both of you are making.   But many miss the point that every other extant organism on this planet is the end product of the same exact evolutionary time span and represents a successful end product of evolution just as we do and the vast majority of them are single celled.

So, while I think it is fair to say things like "bots need increasingly complex challenges to evolve increasingly complex adaptations" I think it is incorrect to claim that copmplexity is somehow 'better' or represents some sort of 'progress' absent some well-defined frame of reference.  In short, we would not long survive in a hot spring.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: scood on April 06, 2007, 03:17:59 PM
whers a zero bot? I cant find one in the bestiearry

whats a zero bot
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: abyaly on April 06, 2007, 06:03:24 PM
Quote from: scood
whers a zero bot? I cant find one in the bestiearry

whats a zero bot
a zerobot is a bot with a bunch of zeros for its dna.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: scood on April 06, 2007, 08:02:28 PM
were can I get one?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Jez on April 06, 2007, 10:13:28 PM
***Zerobot sim, what is it?***

http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?...1958&hl=zerobot (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=1958&hl=zerobot)

You'll need to write your own, it's not difficult, the link describes a zerobot and zerobot sim.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: scood on April 07, 2007, 10:20:13 AM
ty

gosh zerobots take so long to evolve, its been 81 milleon cycles and there still not doing anythin but spin around

oh and my sim is going 3000 cycles per second with 8 zerobot vegies
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on April 08, 2007, 06:54:59 AM
It's not so much a matter of time, as it is the properties of your simulation.  Simply put, just throwing some bots with 0s in their DNA into a sim and running it for ever probably won't work.  You need the environment to carefully sculpt the bot through evolution.  It's very much like growing a bonsai tree.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: scood on April 08, 2007, 11:42:57 AM
yes however

I dont know how to guide the evolution of being able to reproduce, and from there I could do this
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on April 09, 2007, 07:10:03 PM
There should be information on how to get started scattered in various threads.  Simply put, you want an open and error free environment for your bots.  You don't want them to randomly get themselves killed.  Once you get a decent base going, you turn up the heat so to speak, and jack up costs.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: MacadamiaNuts on April 14, 2007, 11:11:49 AM
One trick I like is to use high copy mutations instead of high point mutations to speed it up.

Then you place the bot in the middle of energy spraying vegs, set speed to 0 and manually reproduce it (killing the old ones) until you get a reproducer. Then replace the vegs by zero vegs and let it go.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: kage on April 17, 2007, 05:17:24 PM
Can we jack up mutations really high to let them evolve really quickly?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on April 18, 2007, 02:17:56 AM
Jacking up mutation rates does more to randomize DNA than it does to improve evolutionary speed.  If you're looking to pick a first replicator quickly, it's a viable strategy.  But for a long term approach towards a specific goal, it's not a good plan.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Endy on April 18, 2007, 02:32:09 AM
Can't just jack mutations up and expect evolution to work faster(onetime exception see below). You need a balance of reproduction, mutations, and selection to have evolution.

Edit: Nums beat me to it  

I'll normally raise the mutation rates in the Mutations Panel for awhile.. Mainly it just serves to make tons of mostly junk dna come into existance at the initial start. When some of the junk turns out to allow reproduction I turn the rates back down to allow true evolution to take hold.

You could also seed the sim with veggies(animal zero bots) that both give nrg and trigger repro and/or mrepro. Don't recommend actually using it with most versions though   I've had dnaless bots appear that exploit this to become both immortal and reproductive.

Its possible to speed up the process even more with some human logic... kind of unsporting, but you can add in multiple duplicates of probably useful dna ie. 50 300 -1 7 314 rnd 5 and so on. None of it actually does anything at first, but an inserted store/inc/dec will have a much higher chance of producing "life".

My own belief is that the beginning of life had to have at least some of these conditions occur. Pretty cool that we're simulating the beginnings of life itself.

I still have some concerns on dna "leakage", it's always technically possible for human created functional dna to enter the zerobot. Be better if we could create bots with dna that can't interact with the rest of the sim.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: googlyeyesultra on July 13, 2007, 12:03:41 AM
Can we make it start like this?

cond
A bunch of random numbers.
start
A bunch of random numbers.
stop

cond
A bunch of random numbers.
start
A bunch of random numbers.
stop

...

end

It'd probably evolve quite a bit faster.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Testlund on July 14, 2007, 12:11:04 PM
If you put any DNA code manually in the bot you won't be able to compete for the Evolutionary Price. It must be computer generated. Somebody provided a link here somewhere so you can get randomly generated code if you don't want to use zeros. Maybe it should be a sticky. I'm eager to try that out soon.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on July 14, 2007, 10:44:07 PM
Yeah, I definitely think providing any sort of structure is cheating.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: googlyeyesultra on July 15, 2007, 01:12:56 AM
It's tempting to just use the program to generate a bunch of randomize dna's, and see if any of them are remotely close to conditional logic. Then just evolve those. Still, that would probably be considered cheating as well...

I'm a lot better at finding ways around the rules than actually doing the challenge.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: cliftut on August 03, 2007, 12:07:57 AM
I don't think that would be cheating... if you can come up with conditional logic in less than 50 years by randomizing stats, go for it! ^^; Although I don't think you would be able to tell if they were "close" to conditional logic, because either they have it, or they don't.

Once I get used to DB and understand some of this better, I might give this a shot. I have a slight bit of experience with a game that evolved conditional logic using neural networks, and I think I could use a similar approach to "teaching" them in DB as I did in the other game. I'm not sure if the other program had the conditional logic conveniently coded into the learning mechanism, though... probably did.

Anyway, this seems interesting, so I might attempt this after I've gotten acquainted with the program.

I think the best way to do it would be to pick what sort of conditional logic you want, then gradually work up to a situation in which they have to use it or die! Bwahaha!

Is manual bot-killing allowed? I'm not sure if it would help much, but I just want to know.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: googlyeyesultra on August 03, 2007, 12:39:55 AM
I think it is, ya. I'm taking a semi-serious shot at this. Also, one alternative to help "teach" the bots to do a couple of things while giving them energy: set some costs (like stores, movement, whatever) to a negative value (so the bot receives energy for doing them) and then put some other type of cost on (age, dna, whatever). This'll help evolve them towards including some .up and store commands in their dna.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Trafalgar on August 03, 2007, 10:35:33 AM
So far the most evolved bots I've gotten fire constantly while moving forwards. This is not so good for evolution, however, as they kill each other off rather quickly. Plus I haven't evolved reproduction yet either.

I have tried another approach - starting with a massive genome of all 0s (15k dna length), with shepherd bots (who replace algae and do gain energy as veggies) who go around checking bots and rewarding them with energy based on their DNA length, among other things. Unfortunately, there are a few problems:

1. The bots are not spending enough energy since they're by and large doing nothing, so they're sitting at 29-30k energy all the time.
2. If I have constant-shooting bots in the sim, the shepherds wander into their line of fire and get killed (despite having maxed out shell and a large body). There's no time to react to the shot and flee because when they walk into the stream they get hit by 10+ shots at once. Shepherd death and replacement results in energy rewards not being given due to how I had to implement the only-give-energy-every-so-often system to get around robage and refage being useless after 30k cycles.

Hmm, perhaps having the shepherds trigger mrepro on the other bots if they're above 5k energy would be useful.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on August 03, 2007, 11:47:33 AM
Quote from: cliftut
Is manual bot-killing allowed? I'm not sure if it would help much, but I just want to know.
Yes, it's allowed.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Elite on August 03, 2007, 12:58:38 PM
Quote from: Trafalgar
2. If I have constant-shooting bots in the sim, the shepherds wander into their line of fire and get killed (despite having maxed out shell and a large body).
How about setting energy-per-veg-per-cycle to something enormous like 99999, then the shepherd bots (only vegs in the sim, right?) will have practically infinite energy (might make them a little slow due to body filling up though)
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on August 04, 2007, 05:07:31 AM
If instead of having your shepards wander around you keep them stuck in place, sheparding only the bots around it, you wouldn't have to worry about how fast they travel.  They could be sort of like local gods for the zerobots around them.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Ispettore on October 20, 2007, 12:06:58 PM
Has nobody even come close to obtain conditional logic form a zero bot? I was very interested in this thread...
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on October 20, 2007, 12:26:35 PM
Not to my knowledge.  The prize is certainly still available.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: MacadamiaNuts on October 20, 2007, 03:54:25 PM
Quote from: Ispettore
Has nobody even come close to obtain conditional logic form a zero bot? I was very interested in this thread...

Here, 2nd post:

http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=1965 (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=1965)

It was a sim being ran before the challenge, and it's hard to tell if it had any contamination from some hand coded algas. The bot family that at mass 2 was reacting to shoots became extinct some thousand cycles after.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on October 20, 2007, 04:31:35 PM
Reacting to being shot would qualify in my book.  It's not blind periodic behaviour.  It's not gated on a built in threshold like the body repro limit.

From a quick glance at the DNA, it looks pretty much like 100% evolved code to me.  I'd say contamination from hand authored bots did not play a role.

Sims predating the contest are certainly eligable.

Do you want to make a claim for the prize?  You wouldn't happen to have a saved sim with the shot reacting bots lying around would you?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Ispettore on October 21, 2007, 05:16:18 AM
lol, maca it's all my "guilt" if you win the price
now I'll take a look at your sim!
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: MacadamiaNuts on October 21, 2007, 11:24:08 AM
No I won't claim it.

For start, the zerobot wasn't pure zerobot, but it had a start at the beggining and a stop at the end. And I wouldn't qualify "evolving conditional logic" a gene that didn't survive.  

Maybe I could run that bot again and see if it was able to keep the gene, but, you know, DB is slow running in Wine on Linux. Anyway I would need to use and older executable as it may not work on newer ones.

I think there's a copy of the bot and the sim attached to the thread.

What I find more interesting about that gene is that is conditionless code, although not the 1G style, but a traditional sort of. I mean, the full conditional code would be:

cond
*.shang 0 >
start
value .dn store
else
0 .dn store
stop

the 1G code:

value *.shang sgn mult .dn store

And the even shorter kind used by the bot is:

*.shang .dn store

Basically, its about using no constants, but variables. It would be really interesting to try and handcode bots without constants at all.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Gobo on November 11, 2007, 03:57:21 PM
Quote from: EricL
If you use veggies with enabled DNA in your breeding sim, they must be restricted from mutating else they infect your bots with a virus containing their own human authored DNA.
Restricting them from mutating may not help. Zerobots may evolve viruses, infect veggies, and veggies may then infect zerobots with their DNA back.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Peter on November 11, 2007, 04:02:14 PM
Quote from: Gobo
Quote from: EricL
If you use veggies with enabled DNA in your breeding sim, they must be restricted from mutating else they infect your bots with a virus containing their own human authored DNA.
Restricting them from mutating may not help. Zerobots may evolve viruses, infect veggies, and veggies may then infect zerobots with their DNA back.
Ok, then you just click on virus-immunity at the veggie, to my idea it has been inplented just for that reason.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Gobo on November 11, 2007, 04:33:59 PM
Quote from: Peter
Ok, then you just click on virus-immunity at the veggie, to my idea it has been inplented just for that reason.
Hmmm... Where is that setting?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on November 11, 2007, 05:16:00 PM
Quote from: Gobo
Quote from: Peter
Ok, then you just click on virus-immunity at the veggie, to my idea it has been inplented just for that reason.
Hmmm... Where is that setting?

On the Species tab of the options dialog.   First implemented in 2.43b.  Look here (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=2160) for latest buddy drops.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Gobo on December 07, 2007, 04:30:01 PM
Quote from: Peter
Ok, then you just click on virus-immunity at the veggie, to my idea it has been inplented just for that reason.
Well, what about having sex with veggies (.sexrepro)?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on December 07, 2007, 05:36:30 PM
Quote from: Gobo
Well, what about having sex with veggies (.sexrepro)?
.sexrepro is disabled pending a design consensus.  See this topic (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=2306).
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: fulizer on December 14, 2007, 08:42:40 AM
Quote from: Numsgil
They could be sort of like local gods for the zerobots around them.
like you and ericl are for us.
soory but you guys are great
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: fulizer on January 08, 2008, 08:48:48 AM
Quote from: Gobo
Quote from: Peter
Ok, then you just click on virus-immunity at the veggie, to my idea it has been inplented just for that reason.
Well, what about having sex with veggies (.sexrepro)?
you can do that? horray!
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Blacksmith on January 22, 2008, 08:39:38 PM
so far mine are still spinning, I just started with a bunch of zeros, although with smilemode they are diffeent shapes. Can they evolve to reproduce them selves?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on January 22, 2008, 09:59:12 PM
With enough time, yeah.  But the time required varies, and tends to be in the tens of millions of cycles or something similar.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on January 22, 2008, 10:00:56 PM
Also, mutation frequency is proportional to genome length so it will take much longer starting with a short zerobot then a longer one.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Blacksmith on January 23, 2008, 03:06:40 AM
my current zerobots have a dna length of 554, and 0 genes. nearing 300000 cycles.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Blacksmith on January 23, 2008, 03:18:04 AM
chaging to new sim, zerobots non veggies, with non reproducing veggies in place
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: fulizer on January 24, 2008, 04:59:16 AM
that would be a good idea as reproduceing veggies tend to go everywhere
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Blacksmith on January 24, 2008, 06:21:57 PM
uh, they are can evole the start function right?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on January 24, 2008, 06:25:08 PM
Quote from: Blacksmith
uh, they are can evole the start function right?
Yes, point mutations will eventually hit upon a start.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: rsucoop on February 06, 2008, 10:57:03 PM
what about a one bot challenge. Everything defaulted to 1s with mega high mutations, and lots of starting energy.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on February 06, 2008, 11:24:18 PM
Quote from: rsucoop
what about a one bot challenge. Everything defaulted to 1s with mega high mutations, and lots of starting energy.
A starting bot of all ones is essentially the same as one with all 0's.  They have the exact same entropy.  If you want to start from all 1's, that is fine for the challenge but in practice will be no different than one with all 0's.

You are welcome to tweak the mutation rate to whatever you want but you will find that too high a mutation rate is counter productive.  Benificial mutations will be destroyed before they can fixate.

Start with whatever nrg you want.  Use sheparad bots to supply additional nrg.  Make them all veggies if you want.  Each is legal for the challenge.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Endy on February 08, 2008, 08:42:53 PM
Is it okay to induce the zero bots into making viruses with the shoot/shootval commands? I've been doing some high speed dna creation with point locations then have the bots make viruses to mix the dna's. Both zerobots start from the same zerobot and then I check the dna to prevent possible cross contamination from an authored bot.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on February 08, 2008, 10:19:19 PM
Quote from: Endy
Is it okay to induce the zero bots into making viruses with the shoot/shootval commands? I've been doing some high speed dna creation with point locations then have the bots make viruses to mix the dna's. Both zerobots start from the same zerobot and then I check the dna to prevent possible cross contamination from an authored bot.
Go for it.   You can use shepard bots to shoot info shots into .mkvirus and/or .vshoot or any other location.  

What I want to avoid is any intelligent design, any transfer of human design or engineering to the evolving bots.  Spewed info shots do not in an of themselves consitute any information transfer but as you say, make sure those shepards are marked virus immune....  
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Endy on February 09, 2008, 07:19:53 AM
Quote
make sure those shepards are marked virus immune....

Err... That reminds of me of the other thing I wanted to mention that a virus immune bot can still shoot viruses via info shots. I've had several of the Shepards causing each other to fire viruses into the zerobots. Maybe we could add a check box to make the bot unable to fire viruses, in addition to the virus immune one we have already?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on February 09, 2008, 12:41:24 PM
Quote from: Endy
Quote
make sure those shepards are marked virus immune....

Err... That reminds of me of the other thing I wanted to mention that a virus immune bot can still shoot viruses via info shots. I've had several of the Shepards causing each other to fire viruses into the zerobots. Maybe we could add a check box to make the bot unable to fire viruses, in addition to the virus immune one we have already?
An excellent idea.  Consider it done for the next drop.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Trafalgar on May 07, 2008, 06:38:30 PM
Quote from: EricL
Not to my knowledge.  The prize is certainly still available.

I posted this on aug 11: http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?...p;#entry1371550 (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=2174&st=0&p=1371550&#entry1371550)

I had uploaded the bot's DNA in a zipped txt file here: http://shadowlord13.googlepages.com/bigzer...aimdx_3aims.zip (http://shadowlord13.googlepages.com/bigzerobot_0aa_426g_11e_1aimdx_3aims.zip) (that's still a valid link)

The zerobot-descendants I wrote about in that thread had evolved pacing back and forth. If I analyzed the zerobot's DNA correctly,  it was setting .dn to -15 normally, but changing it to 365 whenever angle(0,0) < 461.

I described the approach I was using to evolving them in a post on Aug 4 and another on the 9th, in this thread (both of those were prior to the conditional evolution mentioned on the 11th): http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?...amp;pid=1371468 (http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/index.php?act=findpost&pid=1371468)

I don't know if I posted the DNA for any version of my shepherd bots (I was modifying them as I went to try to encourage different directions of development) on the forums anywhere, but I still have the saved sims, and I can post the semi-unreadable DNA or readable-but-not-DB-code version of the last version of the shepherds.

This is a screenshot showing (part of) the list of saved sim files sorted by date (that's only showing the most recent 1/3 of the saved sim files): http://screencast.com/t/6XvlVQA6n (http://screencast.com/t/6XvlVQA6n)

I can zip and upload any of these you would like, but I'd need to know which. I'm attempting to 7-zip all the ones from bzb4 and up now, and it's going slow, and who knows how big the 7z file will be.

(bigzerobots-1.sim, for reference, was on 7/13/2007)

I've skimmed through the changelogs, and if I understood them correctly, it sounds like some of the changes to cond stack stuff would break the conditional-behavior of the bots that I had evolved. (There are three conds which together determine whether the last gene runs, and it is that gene which gives rise to the conditional behavior)

Edit: The bzb4 sim files and all later ones were compressed by 7zip to 1.63 MB. I've uploaded the 7z file: http://shadowlord13.googlepages.com/main_bzb4to13_sims.7z (http://shadowlord13.googlepages.com/main_bzb4to13_sims.7z)

I think the bots in those sims evolved in 2.43 and 2.43a (I typo'd the version on the aug 11 post as "4.23a" and never noticed until just now).
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: EricL on May 08, 2008, 12:58:10 AM
I tend to take a month or two off in the Summer time and go sailing with my family, so I was AWOL last August and never saw your post.  It's late here now, but I'll take a detailed look tomorrow.  At first blush, I'm happy to award you the prize as well as keep it open for a second winner on modern builds, but let me read through it in detail tomorrow.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Prsn828 on February 27, 2009, 02:07:29 PM
So I am 15 hours into my first zeroBot sim... and they evolved to reproduce on their own!!!  Right now they are veggies and I will be increasing the costs until I have the 5-10 best, but after that it will be time to throw them into a new sim as regular bots.  The sim started out with 5 50 zero bots and 5 100 zero bots, but eventually the 100 zero bots wiped out the 50 zero bots.  I wonder if this is how it usually happens... anyway, I'm happy to say that I am pleased with the progress they made in the last 15 hours.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on February 28, 2009, 01:51:13 PM
Congratulations   Keep up posted.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: ikke on March 02, 2009, 05:50:54 AM
Quote from: Prsn828
The sim started out with 5 50 zero bots and 5 100 zero bots, but eventually the 100 zero bots wiped out the 50 zero bots.  I wonder if this is how it usually happens...
It's about combinations and permutations. The 100 BP variant had more possibilities of mutating BP into something useful. So yes I do think this will happen usually
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on March 02, 2009, 02:18:03 PM
I'd like to see a zerobot sim sometime with bots with thousands of bps of 0s.  Would be interesting to see if more interesting things develop that way.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: ikke on March 03, 2009, 07:03:55 AM
Quote from: Numsgil
I'd like to see a zerobot sim sometime with bots with thousands of bps of 0s.  Would be interesting to see if more interesting things develop that way.
Under default conditions the only thing happening is deletions decreasing genome length. The bot sin my sims started out with 1000 BP and shrunk without uniquely exiting things happening.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on March 03, 2009, 03:39:36 PM
They'd at least have to start reproducing before genome length decreased.  Unless maybe the bots found .delgene or something.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: ikke on March 04, 2009, 02:29:51 AM
Quote from: Numsgil
They'd at least have to start reproducing before genome length decreased.
Yep. A large genome does not automagically translate into complex behaviour. A complex environment is needed for that. Eating minimalis does not qualify.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: intron on February 11, 2010, 06:04:45 AM
Are initional virus infection or introns* allowed?

* like
cond
start
*.thisbp *.thisbp 8 add 0 .dnalen rnd insert
stop
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on February 11, 2010, 12:52:15 PM
I don't think that would qualify as a zerobot.  But it would probably give better results, so don't be afraid to give it a try (btw there is no *.thisbp.  You'll have to make do with .thisgene (http://www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=.thisgene)).
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Houshalter on February 11, 2010, 01:31:17 PM
Is there an insert command? I didn't think there was.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on February 11, 2010, 02:47:16 PM
No, you have to use a virus.

Actually, I should have linked this page on making viruses (http://www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual/index.php?title=Virus).
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Houshalter on February 11, 2010, 03:10:56 PM
I made this virus a while ago to spread genes throughout a population like Horizontal gene transfer. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer) It kind of works, just make sure the veggies are immune or they mutate it to be destructive, then spread it like wildfire.

[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']start
*.vtimer 0 =
3 rnd 1 =
*.thisgene .mkvirus store
not
*.genes rnd .mkvirus store
*.vtimer 1 =
*.eye5 0 > and
*.nrg 15 div .vshoot store
*870 0 =
*.genes 870 store
*.genes *870 >
*.genes rnd .delgene
*.robage 0 =
100 rnd 871 store
*871 66 >=
870 dec
*.robage 1 =
*871 33 <=
870 inc
*.robage 1 =
0 871 store
*872 *.thisgene !=
*872 .delgene store
*.thisgene 872 store
stop
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: intron on March 01, 2010, 11:32:25 AM
Thanks for the virus, Houshalter, i gonna give it a try after my current sim.
It uses a virus_minimalis:
    >start .vshoot inc *.thisgene .mkvirus store stop<

After 2500000 cycles i got a species average of: dna-lenght 800; 100 genes; 35 condition statements and interessting behaviour.
the bot dna is mostly junk and unreadable, and so is the memory. The bots produce venom, shell, slime and poison in different amounts (i think they produce more shell at low and more poison at high energy - but i'm not shure, looks very random) and cycle between stationary and mobile phases, feed on enzymes or bonds and have a moving behaviour that changes over time.
i can't confirm at this time conditional behaviour, but i can confirm a lot of diversity in all atributes and a lot of adaptation. Especially virus evolution is interesting, because bots tend to find a way (even without slime or shell production) to prevent infection after some thousand cycles (i made dna execution somewhat expensive). i don't know if its biomorph to say there are "pandemics" of new viruses every once and a while (somethimes only a >cond< statement in a virus shell).

i used high brownian motion and gravity and subdivided a small world with shapes of about 1/6 lenght into 5 parts (good for species diversity).

please, anyone start a virus sims to confirm my findings.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Houshalter on March 01, 2010, 04:14:55 PM
Interesting. If numsgil gets the uploads working please upload the sim for the rest of us. Since internet mode isn't working, I might try a sim like that. On my computer Darwinbots tends to crash fairly often, so I might not get very far.  
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: intron on March 01, 2010, 06:00:17 PM
cool. i'll do that as soon as i figuered out how to upload sims.

in case you running DB 2.43 on XP use win 95 compatibility on Darwin.exe. Works for me!
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: intron on March 02, 2010, 05:35:36 AM
i am stupid.
can't upload sims. can't download sims.

is the file management broken or something?
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Ammeh on March 02, 2010, 06:05:54 AM
Quote from: intron
is the file management broken or something?

Yes, sorry  we're working on it.
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Numsgil on March 03, 2010, 03:44:32 AM
I have a plan to fix it but I have to bring the forum offline for a few hours probably.  So I'll probably hold off on it till Sunday (in a go tournament on Saturday.  yay!)
Title: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: bacillus on March 04, 2010, 10:50:26 PM
Cool  
I like go as a game, but I'm no good at it. Always lose...
Title: Re: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: MysticalDumpling on January 18, 2014, 05:13:28 PM
If it is not too late, I think i found a zerobot with logic! It seems to change its aim depending on the number and position of ties... correct me if I am mistaken....  :P I have another similar one in the Bestiary.
Title: Re: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: Botsareus on January 19, 2014, 01:25:03 PM
It is too late man. We shutting the bitch down. I just brought my 2.44 mod back from the dead.  :D
Title: Re: Zerobot evolution prize for conditional logic
Post by: MysticalDumpling on January 19, 2014, 08:25:23 PM
Darn it. :wacko: