Flat Back - Evolved Virtual Creature

[Shalek]

How does it work? Does each part cost energy promoting the removal of unecessary parts and/or improvement of already existing ones?

[kjlg74]

@Shalek Nah, no energy-use calculations play any role in fitness (although it would make a nice addition to program to implement that). Often, fitness is determined by distance traveled divided by a measure of overall body size. That naturally tends to favor the removal of unneeded body parts. It is possible to have it just use distance alone and ignore body size, and that tends to produce creatures with more body parts.

[Yumminess0]

6:34 poor flatties! =D

[kjlg74]

;) just a little rain

[woodenfences]

Thank you for your reply. Since I posted my initial comment I have being running your program on my computer, with very interesting effects, especially when I impose extraordinary conditions, such as very short run time, with selection based on max. height and time spent touching the ground.

I wish I could explore a virtual world inhabited by such creatures, perhaps with a gun to shoot at a ball with they would hold, protect, toss, etc.

Have you thought of adding sounds?

[woodenfences]

Beautiful!

I watched many, many of your clips, and I must say they are always fascinating, and the music perfectly chosen!

I am curious about what could happen if, along the possible mutations, there could be a sudden "doubling" of the body or of a body part.

I remember reading something about the evolution of certain alphabets ; some letters appears to be the product of a doubling of an ancestor, such as v + v = w or n + n = m.

One question: Do the colors of the blocks have a meaning?

[kjlg74]

I apologize for my slow reply. Thanks for the compliment :)

The system does include some kinds of mutations that duplicate body parts in a way. I haven't been collecting any stats on just how often those mutations actually produce useful results in this system - one of many questions there just isn't enough computing time to answer :)

--will continue below..

[kjlg74]

The colors have *zero* impact on fitness or physics. They are controlled by genes, but they just change over time by chance or by hitchhiking along with other genes that are being selected and amplified.

[MPireMallDOTnet]

Hi, Ive only just become aware through the evolution (the irony) of clicking on things that interest me on youtube, it started as looking at crop circles :S (dont ask).

I have always since a child wanted to create something along the lines of this program but never had anything powerful enough to do so (and still dont), I can only program in basic (hey the maths the same) but NEEED to get some serious programs from my brain into a program such as this, how can I go about it, any ideas? PM me plz

[lkartaltepe]

Over long runs how does the fitness increase? Is it a linear increase? Does it tend to flatten out? Does it continue to have random jumps in fitness?

[kjlg74]

Provided that you keep the fitness function and environment static through the whole run, the typical behavior is a kind of S curve. Very steep climb at first, flattening out at the end. That's just the typical behavior. I have seen some that climb linearly for a long time and then level off. They all eventually level off, though, more or less (i.e. improvements get smaller and less frequent).

[newcoleco]

This creature evolution did continue. After 1800 generations, the best fit is almost 140.

[newcoleco]

After generation 600, I did increase the population size gradully from 100 to 700. The best fit did stabilize then a big curve appears in the result and now the best fit is over 130.

The evolution is still running, it's over 1400 generations done.

[newcoleco]

I did continue the evolution of this creature, but I did increase the population size in the settings... it's like having a better chance finding a stronger athlete in a larger population than a smaller one.

The evolution did stop brutally yesterday (a general windows crash), but the best fit is now close to 120 which is approx. 20 points more than the fastest generation shown here.

[kjlg74]

Do you plan to keep it going after you recover from the system crash, or do you want to terminate that run? Do you have access to the files?

[newcoleco]

Problem solved, it was a vicious Windows update problem... now it seems to continue where te simulation left. I did a backup just in case.

[kjlg74]

Glad to hear it :)

[yupko]

So natural, yet so artificial.

[Tailslol]

wow nice one realy!

[maccollo]

is there any limitation to how compelx the brain program can become?

[kjlg74]

Yes, there is. Each body part has, in a sense, four 'brains' associated with it. Each of those is a tree structure (google "genetic programming" to see what I mean) and I put an upper bound on the size of each tree: 1000 nodes. This was done just to limit the processing time/speed needed to run a creature.

[maccollo]

Would be cool to set it to something like

1 000 000 nodes, let it run on a super computer and see how smart they can get :D

[kjlg74]

Absolutely! :)

If I had loads of computing power I'd go beyond merely increasing the node count, too. I'd give them some memory, a neural network they could use, and other enhancements like more complex environments, long evaluation times, creature-to-creature interactions, etc. It would get interesting.. and expensive :P lol

[inthefade]

Great one. love the graph.

[newcoleco]

Wow! That's great!

So the brain change and the creature became more faster.

Thanks for the "grande finale"! I didn't expected that much! I'm still laughing! :-))

[kjlg74]

I knew you'd enjoy the finale!

[newcoleco]

I love it!

More! More! ;-)

[TheReasonWhyGuy]

Did you added a new feature to the program?

Also

I now have the gorilla walkers up to gen 1600 on both and i'm going to be making a video soon but I can't seem to find the one picture per gen instructions...

[kjlg74]

No new abilities in the program, aside from those in the 'special' version that you also have (IIRC). I'll PM you with the ancestry snapshot instructions.