Framsticks

Has anyone got a good smeller? I have been playing with the frogs again
trying to let Smell sensors evolve on the legs but they never last past a
few million generations. Specifying longer life doesn't seem to encourage
smelling food over Distance hopping. I'd like to know if anyone has had
luck with evolving specific traits like this?

-zac

What are people using to make the MPG movies from the
individual frame .BMP files that POV-Ray produces?
Does POV-Ray do it? I can't seem to figure it out.
Thanks- Marc

Does anyone have any bright ideas as to how to evolve complex creatures? All
I keep coming up with are worms and snakes (in and out of water). I thought
I'd had a bright idea by creating a batch of 200 random creatures (I just
set it to no starting energy, 100% mutants and random deletion - leave it
running for a few minutes and voila, 200 random frams) and then evolving
them for distance. But I left it alone for 7 hours and what did I come back
to? That's right, worms. Worms may be the pinacle of evolution, but I'm sure
there must be a way to evolve more complex, more interesting stuff - some
legs would be good! What selection criteria do people use?
If there's no way to evolve such creatures, perhaps a method of selection
for complexity could be included in a future version. This might involve
calculating no. of sticks/no of angles etc... Then, hopefully, I'd get
something other than bloomin' worms.

Matt

Greetings,
I was wondering if it would be possible to get output files
for various parameters. This would allow to plot and monitor more closely
the timely relationship between the genotype and its evolution. I assume
this is not possible as we speak, but would be a nice thing to play with.

Also, I'm not quite sure about the mechanism of deletion of
genotypes. Why sometime I get up to 100 genotypes and a million iteration
later, there is only 3 left? This is not especially good because it forced
my unsupervised evolution to dwell in a local minimum of slow crawling bugs.
I used the "inversely proportional to fitness" methods.

Thanks for the great software, I will use it to introduce Alife in my
biocomputing class.

Christian

This is my first moving creature 'Jim, Jumping Y':

MX(X[| 0 :-0.893,G:0],rrLLX[G:-2.583]MX[| 0:0.797,-1:2.899])

He looks like letter Y and uses tail to jump.
His velocity is about 0.021.
Sometimes he jumps to strong and flips over, but he still moves
(no so fast ~0.006, his tail becomes head)

> does almost every creature i evolved move through cycles???
> Could anyone help me....ahhhh...thanks.......:~)

maybe you should increase 'velocity precision' parameter...

Have already submitted this framstick to FEC, but here's an improved version after a couple million more steps:

LLLX(,LLLX,RRFFX(,rrrrMX[|0:1.751,2:478.891](,MX[|-1:0.840][|G:3.902](,rrX(LLLX,,LLLX)))))

Interesting locomotion - everyone let me know what you think!

This question may have been asked already, but here goes: when I leave the
'Delete Genotypes' set to anything other than Random, there's only one
genotype left when I wake up, with about 200 individuals. Is there a way
around this, because I'd like to weed out the 'bad' frams as much as
possible. Thanks!

Hi Maciej,

Did you have a look at Bulldog yet? If so what do you think? I know I have
asked for this before and that you have been working hard on other aspects
of the simulation, but it would be really useful to be able to assign
fitness criteria on a per stick basis. That is to say, if you could specify
one stick that will contribute to the Frams health if it is kept off the
ground, say, or choose a stick to be the Frams axis and specify a preferred
direction of movement relative to that axis either for the whole Fram or on
a per stick basis. If you could assign fitness on a per stick basis then you
would have much greater control of the direction that evolution will take. I
know the that open-ended evolution of complex Frams is the ultimate goal,
but as things stand computer power is still lacking and will be for sometime
to come.

Looking forward to your reply.

Cheers,

Ander

P.S. I have said this before and I will say it again. Framstiks is f#@%&*g
brilliant. Thankyou!

Hi, I just resently downloaded the Framstick software and I must say I
am very impressed already by it's capabilities. I have just finished
reading all of the documentation, however, when I tried to start typing
in a few genotypes I ran across a major problem. It seems I can't type
alpha characters (i.e. X, R, Q, C, etc...) in the genotype data window.
Is there something I'm missing? If anyone has any suggestions or knows
why this might be happening I would really like the help. Thank you.