I recently discovered a great simulator called Darwinbots. Unfortunately, it seems to be a fairly dead community. I would like to see if I can get some new people going at this, as it is very intriguing and fun. Basically, you can insert robots with "DNA" which is a script. There are many types of mutations that can occur like point mutations, copy errors, and whatnot and all of the rates can be set. You can also set the energy (nrg) cost of everything from moving to existing, and firing shots and lots of other stuff. Since the bots DNA is a script, you can do an evolution sim and change environmental pressures (for example, you can make the alga/plants receive less energy, or make a day/night sequence, up the costs, add shapes/mazes, etc.) You can also write your own bots. The program comes with a few bots as well.
Bots can use NRG to make Body (which is like fat, or condensed energy), Venom, Poison, Viruses, and a ton of other things. Viruses can be used to carry a gene over to another organism. It is extremely advanced and great fun. I suggest you try it. Also, here is an annotated code for the most simple organism that comes packaged with the program, Animal Minimalis.
'Animal_Minimalis
'By: Nums
'Good for mutation sims and for
'newbies to see how a basic bot works.
'Contains everything necessary for it
'to survive and reproduce.
' Gene 1 Food Finder
cond
*.eye5 0 >
*.refeye *.myeye !=
start
*.refveldx .dx store
*.refvelup 30 add .up store
stop
' Gene 2 Eat Food
cond
*.eye5 50 > 'If the center eye detects something with a distance of over 50.
*.refeye *.myeye !=
start
-1 .shoot store 'Shoot an nrg feeding shot.
*.refvelup .up store
stop
' Gene 3 Avoiding Family
cond
*.eye5 0 =
*.refeye *.myeye = or
start
314 rnd .aimdx store 'Randomly adjusts where the bot is aiming.
stop
' Gene 4 Reproduce
cond
*.nrg 20000 >
start
10 .repro store 'This means to devote 10 percent of the energy to the child cell.
stop
end
Darwinbots is made in Visual Basic, and there is also a C# version being programmed that you can help with if you'd like, it's called Darwinbots 3.
To install Darwinbots, you need to run the Darwinbots 2 installer first, then the Darwinbots 2.45.03 installer.
I say we should devote this thread to good evolutions or hand-made scripts for Darwinbots. That way we can run simulations, send each other our bots, and battle them out in different types of simulations with different environments.
If people need more information, I can post some, and there is also a (dated) wiki for Darwinbots where you get the program. It is somewhat hard to understand, but I mostly learned from example.
One more thing! A great thing to do (that takes hours and hours but is probably worth it) is running a zerobot sim. This is when you fill a simulation with some Alga, set it to repopulate (which is the checkbox that denotes something as a plant/alga and gives it free energy) and then 1000 bots whose DNA consists of nothing but 30 zeros. As time goes on, at usually somewhere in the millions of 'cycles' (timesteps) a replicator will emerge, and from then on you can do whatever you wish to cause them to evolve.
It is a great program, and it takes some time to learn, but I wanted to post here to help reinvigorate the community for it. |