Framsticks

First off, thanks to the author. It's a great program! Am I missing
something big or do the creatures in framsticks not give birth? People are
looking for ways to make their creatures more complex, but people just say
'give it time.' Isn't reproduction the key to evolution? I think it would
also be easier to see speciation without out it being contrived by a
threshold value. It would also help predator-prey models (prey reproduce
dumb many and predators bear smart few). There should also be an option
where the newborn's starting energy is taken away from the parent's.

just my 2 cents-
john

I noticed things are quiet. Any news of the new framsticks? And Maciej,
any chance of a macOS version? The Mac floating point hardware screams,
I'd love to utilize those Mac clusters as well.

-zac

A long while ago I found framsticks via a friend of mine who was doing some
research on evolution and he showed me the program. I tried to learn the
programming for making my own stick-creations and had a grand time just
making sticks that wobbled about and never really took anything seriously.
Now that I've landed myself a job - I come back to the website and find a
whole bunch of new stuff - for instance a framsticks2.0 and other such
things where-in i was just coming back to download/register myself a copy
and hopefully try to seriously get some of the programming down to make
myself a creature - and this time with some sort of " brain " to boot!

Needless to say - I'm glad that there is a growing interest in framsticks
and that further development is being done upon it. I'd help out in any
manner I can - but my knowledge of anything via the line of programming or
code is minimal. In the event you guys need beta-testers, however, just
drop me a line and I'd gladly hop aboard ;)

anywho. like the subject says : just stopped by.

Today 0:30-1:30 local time (at night) Framsticks will
be presented in TVN, Polish TV. If I manage to find a PC
outside the firewall, then a live video conference will be
possible. The TV station is in Warsaw, I'll be in Poznan.
Szymon Ulatowski will be in their studio in Warsaw.

Mac

http://www.tvn.pl/ctjren.htm

Maciej and Brad,

I've had a great time with "Headless Chicken" as it like a comic drunk
constantly falling down!

I am trying to learn to "sight read" the .gen code (like reading a musical
score) and find this very difficult. (I get bogged down very quickly). I've
tried to format the list of "genetic" instructions to make it easier to
visualize what is connected to what but it is very difficult to do this for
complex figures and neural connections. I am replying to the thread on
"Framstiks v2.0?" because I'm hoping that perhaps there could be some
consideration of showing which stick correspond to which "X" in the listing
and also, which neuron corresponds to which "[]" in the listing. This could
be done by assigning a numeric value to the stick/neuron as its ordering
appears in the .gen listing. Ideally, the visual display of such assigned
numbers would toggle on/off.

Maybe I just don't have the proper attitude to figuring out this listing --
obviously many users do not have a hard time "reading" the specific structure
in this code. Maybe I'll discover the trick. For now, I think I'll just edit
the list to remove components and see which stick/neuron disappears. (in
neurophysiology research, this technique is called 'ablation').

Thanks for any comment or advice you can give. I really have been enjoying
my time with this and appreciate everyone's effort.

Bill Crandall

Maciej Komosinski wrote:

> > When will v2 be released? I don't need an exact date. Just a month or a
> > quarter or something...
>
> Seems like August.
>
> MacKo

I'm quite new to framsticks but i have been looking for a program like this
for a while.
when I finally found it I saw that it was everything I had been for and have
used it daily ever since.
I don't usually do this but when framsticks2 comes out I going to register
it and hopefully help you guys continue to improve it.

My first creature was kind of a mix between Speedy and a few others its a
sloppy runner but it gets the job done.

rLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLcfMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMiiMMMMMMMMMMiiiiQQQMMMMMMMQQEEEEEEEEQQQMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMiiiiQQQQQQQQQEEEEEEEEEEEEEMMMMiiiiQQQQQQQQQEEEEEEEEEEEEMMMMii
iiQQQQQQQQQEEEEEEEEMMMiiiiQQQQQQQQQEEEEEEEQEEEEEEEEEEEEMMMMiiiiQQQQQQQQQEEEE
EEEEMMMMiiiiQQQQQQQQQEEEEEEEEEEQQQQQQQQQEEEEEEEEEEEEE(,llfMMX[0:2.420,1
:-0.626,1 :-1][ -1 :1,0 :1,0:-1][@-1 :1.409]aFMiq(RMX[|1
:2.088]lQX[|-2:-1.094,1 :1.324],ffqqwXfffMMMMMMMMMMMiEXfX[ @0:-827.297,1
:-1.100]),RRlllfffffffffffffMMMMsX[|-6 :-0.703]RlllaFFFFMsIQX[|-7 :0.852,-1
:2.725])

A more interesting creature was evolved from a basic stick after i had
better learned the program
It gets up on its own. if it falls over a certain way it will get back up
but if it falls the other way it as good as dead.

LLcfMMi(ffffffffffffMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMssssssssssssssssiiiX[ T :2.665,1
:-4.643][@ G :480.476,2 :-321.090]AMMMsssssX[ = :2.726][@ G
:0.789]fffffssswwX[ / :999.000,0 :1.932],LX[@ G
:-0.370]rAmsXRiiqW(ffssssssssssssssssiWWWWX[ @0 :2.260],X[ G :2.672]))

i call him tripod
still a work in progress but evolving moving slowly
i've tried do duplicate the results but with no such luck

cameron

well trying to get a biped
bonework(my personal term) was handcrafted everything else has been evolved.
cant exactly tell you the parameters since i have a tendency to tweak while
running :)

This probably sounds corny but why dont we have a setup like the
"whatever"@home where everyone has the same sim parameters and shares a
collective "best of" genome pool

of course its easy for me to suggest (and i'm probably not the first) since
it wouldn't be ME doing the coding ;)

anyways just waiting for the final build of fram2 though i dont mind the
waiting

I've been thinking about why it is relatively easy to evolve creatures that
can move pretty fast but so much more difficult to evolve a creature that
can find food. I've heard the idea put forward in this forum ( I think by
MacKo himself) that the smell sensors are too strong, but I'm not sure that
this is the key problem.

I'm wondering if instead the problem would be solved if the food balls could
be replaced with food gradients. A food gradient would have a center where
the energy was at its highest concentration, with diminishing concentration
farther away from the center. This would be a diffuse field at lest ten
times the radius of the current food balls.

The advantage of the graidients is that any move up the gradient would
bestow an advantge and any move down the gradient would bestow a detriment.
There can thus be many more increments of fitness than in the current
situation. Right now, a creature that moves half of the way toward a
foodball is no more fit than a creature that moves only a quarter of the
way.

Currently, selecting for speed instead of foodfinding is easier because in
selecting for velocity, there are many more oppurtunities for incremental
progress. A creature that moves a little bit faster is a little bit fitter.
But with food balls instead of the food gradients, a creature that moves a
little bit toward the food is not necessarily a little bit fitter for it.

The question might arise of how biologically realistic the food gradients
might be. I think they are quite realistic if we compare them to the
nutrients in solution that bacteria, euglena, or small animals depend on. It
is my understanding that studies of chemotaxis in, say, the nemotode worm c
elegans invovle nutrient gradients, not discrete pieces of nutrient.

--
___________________________________________
P E T E M A N D I K
Assistant Professor and
Associate Director, Cognitive Science Laboratory
Department of Philosophy
William Paterson University of New Jersey
265 Atrium Building
300 Pompton Road
Wayne, NJ 07470
(973)-720-2173
mandikp@wpunj.edu
http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/faculty/mandik

I wanted to prove that a 3-D food finder ( a deep water swimming foodfinder)
could be made that had only three smell sensors. I call the result
"Trishark". Trishark's morphology and neural topology were hand coded.
Mutations were allowed to change only connection weights. Trishark was
seleected for distance in an environment with progressively less food. Test
him out in world size of 50, with teleport, water depth 10, auto feed 2,
ball energy 1000. His ability to orient toward the stimulus source is quite
robust.

MMMMMXlllMMMMMX[|1:2.951]lllMMMMMX[|1:2.721]lllMMMMMX[|1:2.303]lllMMMMMX[|1:
2.482]lllMMMMMX[|1:2.684]lllMMMMMX[|1:0.887]lllMMMMMX[|1:1]lllMMMMMX[|1:1.39
4]lllMMMMMX[|3:1][0:1.387,2:-3.051,1 :-1.827][-1
:1.061,0:2.351,1:-0.562][-1:0.756,-2:2.003,0:-3.094]RRMMMMMX[|3:-2.183,4:-1.
574,5:2.803,6:-1.685]RRMMMMMX[|2:1.202,3:-0.749,4:-1.672,5:3.004](RCCCCfffff
IIIIIX[S:-1.013],,,,rrlllllllllIIIIIX[-1:-2.552,0:-1.012,1:4.480,2:1.608,3:4
.701,4:0,5:4.269][-2:-1.448,-1:-3.943,0:88.291,1:923.941,2:-1.701,3:3.719,4:
0.594][-3:-2.916,-2:2.039,-1:-2.848,0:-674.984,1:-1.608,2:0,3:2.888][-3:0.83
0,-2:2.784,-1:3.067,0:-1.097,1:1.613,2:-2.429](llllllllffffffffIIIIIX,,,,,,L
IIIIIX[S:-0.618]),,,,rccccfffffIIIIIX[S:-429.136])

--
___________________________________________
P E T E M A N D I K
Assistant Professor and
Associate Director, Cognitive Science Laboratory
Department of Philosophy
William Paterson University of New Jersey
265 Atrium Building
300 Pompton Road
Wayne, NJ 07470
(973)-720-2173
mandikp@wpunj.edu
http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/faculty/mandik