Category: digital organisms

That was scary!

That was scary!

There I sat, after longer than usual. I was waiting for the small population to stabilize. I’d just fixed a problem that had been there for weeks and months, a subtle bug I just hadn’t noticed. Fixing it meant that my little digital creatures, called “Figures,” would behave differently. Maybe the fix would break the system. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to stabilize anymore. Maybe the entire concept has been fundamentally flawed from the beginning. Maybe it’s all been a waste of time.

And then…

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Ep 168: Let’s get back to life

Ep 168: Let’s get back to life

Let’s get back to life

Today, I share a bit of what’s happened with my digital organisms, my ongoing experiments with some software-based artificial life I wrote, and talk about where we’re going next. The general system is very close to where I wanted it in order to implement, oh, just so many experiments. Since I’m attempting to use what I created to study and perhaps even generate intelligence, it’s time to get back to researching how intelligence evolved in the world of biology.

Nearly there

Nearly there

Cycle after cycle, they all do their next command, like the clicking of a master clock, beating out they’re digital days.

Each little digital creature, called a figure, gets a turn. That’s just enough time to do one command. It’s been more than 13 hours, and the current population is somewhere just above 310,000,000. They were randomly generated, and used the slow internal I/O—they can only read write cut or paste one number at a time.

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It’s working! … oh… wait…

It’s working! … oh… wait…

The system has turned into a joy to work with.

One of my populations, precodedshort.pop, isn’t acting how it used to. I have a vague memory of doing some experiment, and accidentally saving a population in that file, overwriting what was there. Yeah, I even recall how I could get it back, and thinking how it didn’t matter anyway, I’m done with it.

Right, the other possibility is that something got messed up somewhere in my system, and it isn’t running right, or the same, somehow. However, every other population is acting how it used to. Before I remembered, just now, that I’d changed precodedshort.pop, I wanted to do another test of the system, to be certain all was well.

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A monster in the realm!

A monster in the realm!

The internal i/o is a mess—the methods that allow the digital creatures to read and write to and from themselves and each other. I’ve always planned on changing it. Each figure, (one of the digital creatures I created) gets a turn, one after another, enough time to execute one instruction. But, no matter how much they are reading or writing, it all happens in one instruction.

That’s too fast!

If one figure is deleting another one, if it happens all at once, the one getting deleted doesn’t have a chance to react. There’s no defense.

I thought I’d test this out, so I did something like core war, and stuck in a figure that does nothing but empty out the memory of other figures. It’s a monster, and all it does is kill.

In the following output, each “n” stands for “null” A letter n means that there is nothing in that slot. Otherwise, you’ll see the size of the given figure. There are 4 slots, and a maximum population size of 3—if every slot is filled, the death object takes out the oldest figure. The figures that copy themselves, the replicators, are 9 numbers long. The monster is only 6. The replicators take three turns to make a new copy. The monster kills a figure every two turns.

Taking all bets!

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It was a clever notion, but not a good idea.

It was a clever notion, but not a good idea.

It’s been several days since I noticed that my oh so very clever notion wasn’t actually a good one. I’ve been developing my little subleq creatures, called “figures,” layer by layer. There is one more layer to go, and I had what I thought was a brilliant way to implement it. That is, until I tested the new layer against the old version and saw that the same exact run, with the same exact results, was taking up to 59 percent longer!

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In the pines, in the pines

In the pines, in the pines

I must make note of this mess before it leaves my head, and leaves me lost in the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine. I would shiver the whole night through.

In the newly defined handler object, there are methods that get called when a figure is added to the realm.

Handler.realmAdd(Realm realm, Figure figure)
Handler,realmAdd(Realm realm, Figure figure, int address)

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