Hibernating Frogs
08 March 07 - 05:03 am
I just thought I'd mention that last weekend I had a population of frogs that evolved hibernation naturally. Frogs use the least energy when resting, 5 times less than any other biot. This is because of those legends of ancient frogs living in stasis inside stones for decades. I did specifically expect to eventually see a natural hibernation stratagy evolve in Biots. It was nice to see it actually happen last weekend. The population was really successful too. They were around for a few dozen "years" at least. Eventually they were usurped by some Gilas, probably after a dramatic climate change. I wasn't watching the entire time.
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Polish Notation Parser in ActionScript
07 March 07 - 09:16 am
I'm planning on writing a Space Shooter that evolves enemies using a Genetic Algorithm. To do this, I need a simple programming language that the enemies will follow. I'm planning on building it using Polish Notation because then I don't have to bother with precedence and can just breeze through strings to evaluate them as code. The first hurdle is the Artimetic Operators...
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Logical, Altruistic Biots
07 February 07 - 10:16 am
Last night I had some time to add some more logical operations to the biot brian! Their "mental actions" used to only consist of AND, SKIP, and IF/ELSE blocks, which are described on the biots info page.
The new mental actions are OR, XOR, and NOCOPY. OR and XOR work like AND, evaluating two conditions instead of the usual one in order to decide to try an associated action. NOCOPY skips the next meme if its action is the same action the biot took in the previous turn. I can see all of these abilities adding useful sophistication to the Biot mind. For instance a Biot could easily use NOCOPY in an algorithm that makes them curve left, then curve right as they walk, sweeping a wider area, perhaps using vision to tell them to move towards food.
I also added an action called FEED. Biots can use this action to donate some energy to a fellow biot (or even a plant!). This is a test to see if Biots will evolve altruism given the chance. I can see a parent feeding its children being a useful survival strategy. Feeding plants could even encourage farming, but I doubt biots can "think" that far ahead.
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Laser Bunnies!
05 February 07 - 09:06 am
Just an anecdote. I'm sure these biots will kill each other off soon, but I've got some rabbits that blast each other with lasers for no good reason. They don't even eat the meat!
Edit: Yep. they're all dead. Such sensless destruction! When will they learn?
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Genetic Algorithms Can Learn Conceptual Relationships?
05 February 07 - 08:56 am
Or at least act like they do. I'm looking at a population of biots that has made the connection between trees and fruit. Specifically, there are some pine-cone eating species that make sure they stay inside the pine forests, curving around back into the woods whenever they enter a clearing, or a copse of trees that aren't pine. Obviously, this means they are much more likely to find their favorite food. Unfortunately, like most really-efficient food-finding algorithms in Biots, it makes the tree population suffer.
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Searching for food and territoriality
01 February 07 - 05:02 am
I'm looking at a population of biots that spends most of their time spinning around. It looks like most of them are moving up to food when it appears ahead of them. This is a pretty straightforward searching strategy. It's probably an easier algorithm to come by then walking until food comes into vision, and then turning the correct direction. It's probably just as simple an algorithm as walking until food is felt, and then spinning until it's in front of them so they can eat it, but it uses less energy and covers a different kind of area. Since food tends to appear near other food, moving towards one thing to eat puts biots in a position to discover more food.
The interesting thing about this search strategy is that the area a hundred pixels around each biot is hotly contested territory. When a biot feels another biot, it uses it's pikachu-like electricity power to zap the other biot, flinging it aside and stunning it for a few turns. Obviously biots this concerned with territory aren't so good at sexual reproduction. They reproduce asexually, and one sibling will zap the other away to make sure they aren't competing so directly for food in the same area.
A little while earlier, some of the biots were attacking and eating intruders instead of zapping them, but the zapping biots quickly became the dominant strain. This is probably for two reasons. One, an attacking biot will get zapped by zapping biot before being able to kill and eat it. Two, attacking biots either compete with, or eat their siblings, while zapping biots settle territory disputes quickly and then get on with their separate lives.
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Teleporting Penguins
26 January 07 - 04:23 am
I decided to turn off the "cheat" on a local version of Biots that started newly created biots out with instructions to reproduce and eat. The Mac at work is a dual-processor, which means I can actually take advantage of the fact that Biots is multi-threaded. In biots, the trees can mutate into laying eggs instead of fruit. I use this to generate a whole population from a singe seed, and also to simulate "genetic drift". But now these mutant children of plants don't get any more breaks, and it takes a while of random trial and error to get an animal that will move, eat, and reproduce.
But it payed off, thanks to the speed of this computer. Right now I'm looking at a population of biots whose reproductive strategy is to 1) teleport to a random location 2) feel for a piece of fruit, or a pine-cone 3) turn until they face the food 3) eat 4) reproduce asexually, if they have enough energy. 5) some of them hybernate in winter, while others continue on (thereby reducing competition)
All completely unprogrammed at the beginning! These biots figured out how to eat and reproduce on their own!
Also, I added sunflowers. Sunflowers grow very fast in the summer, but not at all during the rest of the year. They can't pass energy to other sunflowers, like grass and lilypads do. They also count as protein, food, and leafy during the summer (they are hidden during winter and flood, and just leafy the rest of the year)
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Artificial Unlife?
24 January 07 - 10:26 am
I finally got around to listening to the Biota.org podcasts, which reminded me that I wanted to add zombies to biots. Actually, playing Urban Dead, and adding both ALife characters and Undead to the Nerdcore Card Game rules also may have had something to do with it.
Zombies can't have babies, but they can inject their (often mutated) programming into another biot just by biting it!
Zombies can be added via the ridiculously long menu, or by waiting for a special mutant fungus to appear and then wating for a biot to eat it.
Here are the sprites I made for the zombies. Spooky!
Grar!
By the way, if Brian ever gets around to setting up my wiki space, I'm
going to start putting the Nerdcore Card Game rules online. I'd also like to put up a Biots wiki.
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