Messages

106

Suggestions / Digging into the egrid

« on: April 15, 2005, 05:38:02 PM »

Please, can somebody (best of all Nums, I think, since he's directly working on the project) give me a rapid (but possibly complete) description of the features of the environment grid you're going to implement? I don't exactly know where to look to find one.

Thanks

107

Old Suggestions Awaiting Programming / Veggie Energy

« on: April 14, 2005, 04:34:28 AM »

I agree with Shvarz and Nums on the fact that the new system is more realistic than the old one. The old one was not designed to be realistic, but essentially for:

1) having stable simulations, with a good bots/vegs ratio (the more vegs, the slower the simulations) by:
2) avoiding starvation by boosting up vegs growth when to few were in the sim
3) avoiding overgrowth of population cutting the energy input when it as too much.

So the idea was something like: the simulation is like a universe: inside it, the total energy is constant, it can only move from vegs to bots and vice versa. This is not realistic, since Earth is not a closed system, as a constant amount of energy comes from the Sun.

If you manage to get such an open system stable and "playable", then it's ok.

108

Dead-End and Solved Suggestion Requests / cns

« on: April 14, 2005, 04:19:22 AM »

We could make a new kind of tie that we could use to connect all the bots to the same tie. That would fix the problem of communications, and making mega bots.

You people have a really strange idea of evolution. Instead of exploiting the rules of the universe to achieve new degrees of complexity, you ask god to change those rules. This is like cheating, and brings you nowhere.

109

Off Topic / Web Page

« on: April 12, 2005, 07:01:37 AM »

Well, basically you have to save all the site structure to disk without changing the links, and simply re-upload it to the new server. You can do it by hand - the site is relatively small- or use a dedicated tool, if you manage to find one

Or I can do it for you

110

Off Topic / Web Page

« on: April 12, 2005, 05:37:45 AM »

I can't understand why you can't simply begin by copying the old web page onto the new space. Then you'll start modifying it over time...

111

Old Suggestions Awaiting Programming / Offline FTP thingy

« on: April 11, 2005, 07:22:09 PM »

There might be a problem with unwanted bots online though, IIRC someone released a load of F1 bots onto the FTP last time a public one was up and of course they destroyed any evo sim being run. How would you sort out the right bots for the right sims?

My idea is that you should not be able to insert robots in some kinds of sim, just let the original ones evolve.
I see it this way: mr. Newbie downloads his copy of darwinbots3.0. Now he can do three different things: start a new simulation, load a saved sim, and, third, join a simulation on the internet. By choosing to join a simulation, a list of the available simulations is downloaded from the sever: by choosing one, DB downloads the environment, a bunch of robots, and starts simulating. In this type of sim, you cannot insert robots in the sim: you just don't have any control on it. (It would be great to make a screensaver version of it, should be easy.) So, who manages the server also decides which simulations are available, with which settings, which starting robots, and so on. He don't even has to include them in the client, because they are made available just through the server.

Somebody else likes the picture?

112

Old Suggestions Awaiting Programming / Offline FTP thingy

« on: April 11, 2005, 06:37:58 PM »

Well, I should have no problem both with the server part (php and mysql) and with the client part. But I'd be happy to leave this one to you (but I can give you some advice if you need it)

113

Tips and Tricks / NO MORE OVERFLOW

« on: April 11, 2005, 06:34:49 PM »

For example if I run my killer multibot Dimacheri with mutations it will definatly lose against a non mutating version ...

I think this happens because fighter bots are designed to be perfectly fit in their own environment, and also because they have no redundancies, etc. You should take for the try some evolved bots with all their "junk dna", as it was c. circumgirans.

Anyway, why doesn't anybody take care of all these tries - also those suggested by numsgil-? It would be extremely interesting to make a serious study, with all the numbers, graphs, etc., from the biological point of view. Shvarz, are you reading this? What do you think about it, a statistical study of the (possible) advantage given to a species by a mutation rate in an alife sim?

Although one of Carlos points gave me an idea. The arena in DB pretty much stays the same so mutations aren't needed as much to adapt to new climates.

Hmmm... and what about a programmable change of environment, say: "in the next 10 million cycles, slightly change friction (or costs, or whatever else) from <startvalue> to <endvalue>". They you go to sleep, and the morning after...

114

Old Suggestions Awaiting Programming / Offline FTP thingy

« on: April 11, 2005, 06:16:18 PM »

No, you shouldn't need an active connection, just a simple ftp server (I used to run cerberus ftp, try it). When you're not connected to the internet, your address is 127.0.0.1
Anyway, adding the ability to use a local dir would be useful and simple.

Also, I figured out a new way to implement a good internet sharing server. I've been learning php and mysql in the last months, so this is how I would do it now:

DB should pretend to be a web browser, that is, it should communicate with a web server sending http headers and messages (not difficoult to do)
The server would be the web server of darwinbots.com.
DB would talk to the server to require a robot or to request saving of a robot; every request to save something should carry a security code (for example, a hash of the robot dna) to discourage intrusions and misuse.
On the server side, all requestes would be processed by a php script, retrieving and saving robots to a mysql database.

The system would be much more flexible than it is now, allowing a centralized management of the server files, separate groups for each kind of sim, and so on. I could write the php/mysql server part, if someone wants to write the client code.
I definitely think that a good sharing feature should be present in any major future release of DarwinBots.

115

Tips and Tricks / NO MORE OVERFLOW

« on: April 11, 2005, 05:48:13 PM »

The bots can mutate "naturally" without setting any mutation rates. With waste occasionally a bot will store something in mrepro.

Oh God, my knowledge of DarwinBots is sooo outdated.
On the other side, sometimes a find asking myself - possible that they _really_ know each of the tons of interactions rules they have put in it?   :)

116

Dead-End and Solved Suggestion Requests / AAA Here it is

« on: April 11, 2005, 05:38:02 PM »

The original mutation system had a special routine to mutate sysvars into other sysvars - if I remember well. All values followed by a store op were considered as sysvars? Probably so. Anyway, there was also an array keeping track of all the sysvars and other (free) memory locations (the usedvars array). The principle was: always mutate a sysvar into another sysvar _already present in the array_. Once in a while, mutate the array by adding a new random memory location. This was to increment the probability of mutating sysvars into other useful memory locations, while leaving open the chance of developing the use of completely new memory location (example, for storing permanent values, etc.). But I think this never happened, anyway :(

117

Tips and Tricks / NO MORE OVERFLOW

« on: April 11, 2005, 05:26:57 PM »

Sorry, Nums, I can't understand your point. At the end of your post you say "evolution, only works from the individul's point of view". And that's right. So, how can you say that the interest of single robots should be to keep their mutation rates at 0, because mutation is in the species' interest?
If evolution works from the individual's point of view, and species evolve, this must be because mutating is in the individual's interest.
View it this way. Many biologists even say that evolution works from the gene point of view, that is mutation is in the interest of the genes, not even the individuals. Suppose you have a robot with n genes, and one of those genes is able to specify the global mutation rates for that robot. That gene should be more likely to spread if it triggers little enough mutations to preserve the dna functionality, but, at the same time, it has to trigger some because this increase its probability to spread in an environment subject to slow changes.
Anyway, I did some experiments with DarwinBots some time ago. I took some kind of rather primitive robot (like C. Circumgirans, or so) and cloned it (loaded it two times in the same simulation), creating two teams. One of them had a zero mutation rate, and the other one a low mutation rate, greater than zero. Then a ran a few simulations, and - surprise!- usually the team with a non-zero mutation rate won the sim. Well, now you have teams and auto reloading of sims with stats, so you can make some more accurate study about it. Who wants to try?

Bye, C.

118

Off Topic / Funny booo

« on: April 11, 2005, 04:47:47 PM »

Hmm ritalin... sounds good. Isn't it good for concentration? Why should it affect negatively programming skills?

119

Off Topic / Is that The Carlo or just a kid with the same name

« on: April 11, 2005, 02:09:30 PM »

Trolling and lurking, slightly different meanings? Oh God.

basic Usenet jargon

120

Off Topic / Is that The Carlo or just a kid with the same name

« on: April 10, 2005, 01:50:47 PM »

>Have you been trawling through the forum for a while now?

trawl
v. intr.
To fish with a trawl.
To troll.

No, I haven't. But I can start, if you like me to :))

Bye, C.