A different kind of explosion

[Charles Gill]

Part of an AI portfolio I'm working on. Then things went wrong. To quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurrasic Park; "Life finds a way".

http://web.me.com/ryecatcher/Burlap/Blog/Entries/2009/8/4_Cambrian_Explosion.html

[HiggyB]

Cool.

[JTBentley]

If the idea is to eat the green thing, your creatures are extremely dumb

On the plus side, they're very pretty

[Quietus]

Curiously my simulation stayed steady at around 400 individuals, yet at times dropped down to 0 breeding pairs. I'm guessing they all moved to san francisco?

[Charles Gill]

Yeah, as a GA it was a complete bomb.

I have these abstract Colony, Species and Organism classes wherein the Colony hosts a species and spawns organisms.

Out of curiosity I put a wrong concrete species in a wrong colony. The gene code (in the species) versus the fitness curve (in the colony) didn't mesh well, so not only would they not breed in a linear fashion (thus the explosion) but the fitness hardly improves.

Their creator was beneficent but dumb.

Charles

[Charles Gill]

@Quietus: Yeah, I didn't like the visual effect of discrete generations so there is a minimum number of entities that must be maintained. When all the creatures that were bred from the previous generation (or none in the case of generation 0) have been born, if that number falls below a certain threshold, I spawn enough blank slate (parentless, random) creatures to make up the difference. The idea would normally be that this serves as an initial bootstrap to get things going, but when they are as dumb as my little fellows they need constant subsidization.