VOLVE 5.0
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ALIFE: 1.6 billion served
May 19th 2006"served" isn't the right word. 1.6 billion creatures born. The simulation is at about 30 million simulation steps. I don't have way to fetch this statistics yet, but an important number in such a simulation is the generation of an organism. The max generation would be the creature with the biggest generation number. This number is how many parents/grand parents etc... this creature has all the way back to the first organism in the sim. From sampling the population here are some numbers: A fungi creature: 202,954 th generation A roamer creature: 142,975 th generation These numbers make sense as the toxic fungi creatures reproduce faster and in groups. That's kind of their survival strateg. They spew spores and others eat them, so fungi is kind of super organism that is hard to eradicate because they are all sharing energy, and of course reproducing more frequently than the roamers. Roamers move in this pattern: They head in the North-East direction (eating and reproducing) then swing down and head back in the opposite direction (south west). roamers are very cautious. The nibble at the fungi very tentatively. Their shape is that of a vertical bar. They range in size from about 2 squares to about 8 squares. But the 'generation' number also reveals how much evolution has taken place. For example, the average human to human reproduction is about 20 years. But this is exceptionally large for a mammal. Lets pick 5 years. How many generations till we get to the death of the dinosaurs? Well that was 65 million years ago. So there are about 13 million generation between any of us and some kind of creature that lived during the last days of the dinosaurs. This project should achive about 9 million generations over a 1 year period. That is pretty signifigant. Many things could alter this. If later in the sim the life cycles changes so that creatures don't reproduce as rapidly, then this estimate could change a lot. I harp about how many creatures have been born (1.6 billion) or the number of steps (30 million), but really 'max generation' is a better indicator of the amount of evolution that has had a chance to take place. I will make a big deal of the "1 million-th generation". This should happen a month from now. Oh I added a forum for discussing Evolve and other related topics: [url=http://evolve4.invisionzone.com]Evolve 4.0 Forum[/url]
Furture work for Evolve
May 17th 2006I have a list of little GUI items to change. At least for the forseeable future the core simulator won't change so that the "one year of alife" will be compatible. But one feature that is taking up all my thinking is [b]"competition mode"[/b]. Up to eight strains of creatures can be placed on a blank simulation, and then you watch them evolve. Strains cannot interbreed. You can then see which strain (or strains) become successful and which ones die out. This feature will allow competition mode for people who like core wars. You can write a KFORTH genetic program and compete against other programs. Several variants are possible: By disabling reproduction (preventing KFORTH programs from using the make-spore instruction) you have your basic arena style robot war game. By keeping reproduction but disabling mutations (setting the mutation rate to 0%) you have an interesting variant in which you can clone your robots and breed an army hoard, but they won't mutate (and thus won't evolve). Anyway, I think I can introduce this feature (plus lots of related features) without altering the core application much. You can already kind of play these kind of games, but it is clumsy and difficult to setup. Mostly I need the ability to drag/drop organisms around etc.., and introduce the concept of "strain". Strain will use the upper 3 bits of the organism-ID (a 64-bit integer). This gives eight total strains in any simulation. The only change to the simulator is that organisms from different strains cannot reproduce together. This means the starting "strain" of a creature is retained throughout the simulation. At any time we can count up all the creatures for each strain (this would constitute the "score" of the game).
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