Help, my framsticks live forever! 
Submitted by Frans Verbaas on Mon, 2002-09-30 19:23

Hi there,

I did a lifespan directed evolution experiment on a genepool containing
food finders and fast walkers. I kept a constant number of 10 energy balls
in the world. All went well for a 100 million steps or so, and then the
inevitable happened. One instance of a mutant proved so effective that it
could gather food more rapidly than burn it. The simulation ran unattended,
and since energy balls are replaced immediately after consumption, the
bastard had aggregated over a million of units of energy, taken in at 200
units a ball, and I had wasted a night or so of computations on it.

Question is, how can I avoid this? Can I set a maximum value for lifespan,
some kill_at value, and possibly credit the fram's fitness rating for the
remaining amount of energy?

Lowering the energy content of the balls is not an option. This would work
too much against the other creatures. Also, it is no guarantee that this
will not happen again. This was instance number 233 of this same genotype.
It's 232 brothers or sisters (are frams male of female?) had an average life
span of 13500 steps, that is just 35% over the basic lifespan in the
experiment.

It is obvious that this instance just had a lucky draw. It would be helpful
to have individual statistics foe each genotype, giving minima, maxima and
standard deviation of its instances. I assume this will be easy done with
some script, once version 2.2 is out......

Frans Verbaas

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Submitted by Bryan M. Smith on Tue, 2003-05-20 00:25

I've had a similar "problem". Mine is just a stick with a length muscle...
And every time it "bounces", during landing it gets a little bit of energy.
It flails around the whole time... Let me know if everyone else gets this...
Here he is: LLAF(,LLLLLLLL(AX[LMu, p:1, p:1]))

Submitted by Frans Verbaas on Tue, 2003-05-20 17:59

I have tried for a while, but in the standard setup, without feeding, I did
not observe cases of eternal life.

Are you sure to have energy consumption on:
either
- idle energy in Parameters|energy
or
- muscle work energy in Group|creatures.

Any energy gain you observe comes from assimilation. (The A 'genes').
AFAIK recuperation of mechanic energy is not in the (standard) model. It may
be possible, though, by specifying a negative value for muscle dynamic
energy.

Nice jumper, though.

Frans

Maciej Komosinski's picture

Submitted by Maciej Komosinski on Wed, 2003-05-21 10:36

> I have tried for a while, but in the standard setup, without feeding, I did
> not observe cases of eternal life.

Living forever is possible when energy incomes are
grater than energy usage.

In these rare situations, "aging time" may help.

> Nice jumper, though.

It jumps because the length muscle is experimental and
may cause exceeding the border of simulation stability.

MacKo

Submitted by Bryan M. Smith on Wed, 2003-05-21 13:45

I was wondering if there was a "buffer overflow" problem. Fortunetly it
doesn't crash, i just get a weird creature... ohh well, i'll try again when
the length muscle is production.

Maciej Komosinski's picture

Submitted by Maciej Komosinski on Tue, 2002-12-17 12:01

See the "Aging time" parameter.

Submitted by Borovik on Tue, 2002-10-01 20:57

Helo.

My advise is - low down the ingestion value. It
works preatty well in my experiment.

Your result sounds outstanding! Is there any possibility to see that gorgous
genotype?

best

Marcin

Submitted by Frans Verbaas on Thu, 2002-10-03 18:35

Well. I take it a san error or so in the simulator, or this instance just
had a lucky draw.

Yes, with lower ingestion there is less chance of such a 'perpetum vivum',
but I think any program should have a stop criterium.
I did quite some simulations on other subjects in the past, but always with
a hard end criterium.

I am planning to submit it to FEC.

Frans