[ARC] Auto Evo- I think I have a solution

Alright, first of all, I haven't posted this suggestion on another thread because those threads were ancient, and I'll be honest, I despise necro-posting. So I have come up with an idea how auto-evo would work, and before I start, I would like to say this is going to be a very long post.


So, we have auto-evo- uncharted, unexplored. No one knows how it will function- it's a mystery. Yet, it's so important, and so fundamental, that it must be conquered, one way or another.

So before we start anything, we need to ask one simple question:"What is auto-evo?"

Auto-evo, short term for automatic evolution, is really meant to simulate evolution, Lamarcian to be exact. Now, that was an easy question, but how about the next one:"What is evolution?". Although that is a mostly philosophical question, I'll try and put it's purpose in nature in short: It gradually makes changes to living beings, adapting them to new environments and making them more used to old ones. Evolution is supposed to grant the creature a chance to survive in the cruel world, and when we're talking about survival, we are talking about the solution to auto-evo.

Survival- In short, being able not to go extinct. So, using a little logic we can define evolution, and therefor auto-evo as well, to be able not to go extinct.

So, to not go extinct, what do we need? We need simply need to make the creature in question produce more descendants than 1 before they die.

So, my whole system will be revolving around two things- life and death, but mostly the latter one.

Now, let's begin with the actual system now.

Let's begin with an example- We have a creature, a herbivore, on a planet named Zortex. The creature is mild large, mostly grazes on local flora, and requires relatively little water to survive. However, this creature has a problem- It is hunted and eaten by a predator it's approximate size. They both have the same speed- 36 km/h. So, judging by this, what do you think- what causes the most deaths to the herbivore? Obviously the annoying predator does. What does it need to improve? Well, the easiest thing to do is increase speed. Now, you probably didn't understand the point of this, but I am going go straight to the point-

First of all, every creature would have it's own death counter. The death counter measures how much deaths does the creature have every tick. But more importantly, it measures the how much of each type of death does the creature suffer every tick. There would be the following types of death:

Drowning/Suffocation- Happens when the creature dies due to lack of oxygen
Hunted- Happens when the creature is killed by a predator (the other creature was having an offensive attack)
Poisoned- Every time the creature dies of poisoning, the computer would memorize what poisoned the player originally
Injury- Creature bled to death
Dehydration- Creature died of thirst
Starvation- Creature died of hunger
Hypothermia- Creature died of low temperatures
Heat- Creature died of high temperatures
Eaten- Plants only, self explanatory
Drought- Plant only, heat
Clogged- Filter feeders only, an object clogged the filter

Now, every tick, the computer would first scan which one of these has the largest value, and then reset the counter. Than the computer would choose a "solution" for the death. Actually, since there would be multiple solutions, the computer would randomly pick one, although the chances would be heavily influenced by multiple factors. Here is the complete list of solutions for every type of death (also, the main food source is simply the food the creature eats the most, it would be easy to implement, and there would be three of them):

Drowning

Grow gills
Base chance- 10%
If there is a main food source that lives in water- +20%
Higher lung capacity
Base chance- 20%
If there is no main food source in the water- +10%
If there is a main food source that mostly lives up to 1000m below ocean level- +10%
If there is a main food source that mostly lives below 1000m below ocean level- -10%

Hunted

Better sight/hearing/smell
Base chance- 20%
If herbivore- +10%
If carnivore- +5%
If omnivore- +10%
If the time between the moment the predator landed the first hit and the moment the prey became aware of the predator is less than 7s- +20%
If the earlier statement isn't true- -10%

Increase muscle size for the muscles used for moving
Base chance- 20%
If speed of predator is lesser than the speed of the prey- +20%
If speed of predator/ speed of pray is equal to or more than 2 than- -10%
If underwater- +20%

Grow horn
Base chance- 10%
If carnivore- +10%
If herbivore- +5%
If speed is greater than 5 m/s- +10%
If underwater- -10%

Grow claws
Everything same as the above except speed modifiers

Poisoned

Grow immunity
Base chance- 5%
If the plant/animal is main food source- +15%

Avoid(AI)
Automatic if not immune

Injury

Grow shell
Base chance- 20%
If underwater- +10%
If herbivore- +10%

Thicken skin
Base chance-20%

Dehydration

Decrease water consumption
Base chance- 20%
If the biome the creature lives in is desert- +20%

Starvation

If one of main food sources is another creature:

Increase muscle size for the muscles used for moving
Base chance- 20%
If the prey is the same speed- +20%
If the prey is up to 5m/s faster than the creature in question- +10%
If the prey is more than 5m/s faster than the creature in question- -10%
If the other creature is a herbivore- +5%
Grow horn
Same as the same solution up in the "hunted" section
Evolve stealth
Base chance- 20%
If the prey is faster- +20%
If the creature is faster- -10%

If one of the main food sources of the creature is a plant:

Boost digestive system
Base chance- 20%

Now, I haven't finished the rest yet due to the lack of time, but to prevent so called super creatures, creatures would be able to have only half of the possible solutions active at one time.

I have also noticed a problem. Disasters. If we for example had flood, than the creature would automatically evolve bigger lungs or even gills. If someone could think of a solution, I would be grateful.

Do you like the idea?

Whenever any of those things is involved, the creature will need more energy and nutrients to grow. This would increase the chances of starvation. This provides a natural way to limit adaptations without a hard limit of 50% of the available ones.

Seems workable. Implementation wise, some of the solution conditions would be rather difficult to keep track of, though.

Some notes:

• Outbreeding a cause of death should be a valid strategy, especially for prey
  
• It should be possible for a species to shed a trait to make room for other, more beneficial ones when the situation changes, e.g. a predator goes extinct.
  
• The trait budget should probably rise over the course of generations, but slowly. If that increase is random per species, it might even be a way for dominant species to emerge.
  

@Holomanga- I guess you have a point. Other than that, do you think the system would work?

Nimbal- Shedding traits is taken for granted. Problem is, when is a creature going to shed traits? Also, which condition would be hard to track?

Alright, just so we are on the same page, I'd like to explain what I think is possible to actually implement. First off, there's just no way that we can actually, physically simulate a whole eco system of several species with thousands or more creatures all interacting with each other. The work load for the physics engine alone would be staggering, not to mention the AI processing. We will have to limit ourselves to simulating the immediate area around the player to create a believable world with maybe a few dozen creatures on screen at a time.

Of course, a few dozen creatures are not enough to do any kind of evolution. That's why it's necessary to boil the AutoEvo part down to statistical processes that we can express in formulas. That's certainly possible for population dynamics like you are describing. But remember that all we can use in those formulas must be simple properties of the species like mass, size, speed, reaction time, etc.

The most problematic condition you gave as example is

Tarpy wrote:

If the time between the moment the predator landed the first hit and the moment the prey became aware of the predator is less than 7s

For that to be part of the model, it must first be boiled down to a statistic like "average time between awareness and attack". Of course we can say that this time depends on the alertness of the prey, and the stealthiness of the predator. "Alertness" and "stealthiness", in turn, must either be properties of the species or they have to be calculated themselves. Alertness, for example, could depend on the sensory and neural properties of the species.

It might be easy to dream up some equations that describe all that stuff. And writing some code to evaluate those equations will be easy as well. But those formulas will have all kinds of parameters that we'll have to tune, and I imagine that will be incredibly hard and frustrating to get right. For example, tuning the knobs to get a fast and stealthy, but vulnerable predator to evolve will almost definitely have all kinds of side effects. Maybe we overcompensated and now all predators are fast and stealthy, forcing prey to evolve dozens of eyes and noses for their alertness property. Or the prey itself evolves to be equally stealthy, wiping out the carnivores because they can't find any more prey.

So always keep in mind that whatever AutoEvo uses for data to evolve the next generation of creatures must be a statistic. And the simpler those statistics, the better.

The problem is, interaction with other species is a necessity for evolution. We simply can't make formulas for evolution. Even if we used formulas, we would still get tons of lag due to all the processing time needed.

No it wouldnt. It will be turn based , kind of like chess (have you seen the accepted auto evo thread?)

It takes far less time to process formulas then to process actual evolution.
I like the Old Idea, this idea has WAY too many problems... I don't mean to sound so cynicle but please.

In my prototype I have ACTUAL evolution, doing this on a planetary scale woud kill the processer, i'm sorry but your systom needs to be much more clean.

Believe me, evaluating some formulas will take waaaayyy less than actually simulating it. Even if we took out collision detection and only simulated AI and some very basic movement.

And using a statistical model doesn't exclude interaction. Predators will hunt prey, which will influence the population of the prey's species. How big this influence is will depend on the species' (both predator and prey) properties.

Just to add in here, wasn't auto-evo already decided upon?

It may be I've missed something, but the last time I checked we had a pretty good idea how auto-evo was going to work. This thread contains the most current work, and even though it's not exactly finished, it is a well developed concept.

As Nimbal mentioned, we will not be simulating more than a few individuals at any one time (at most a few hundred, but ussually closer to 20), so that doesn't provide us anywhere near enough information to drive evolution. What we will use instead are models of species fitness and survival (see this thread for some development of this, though its a work in progress) to determine what mutations would be benificial.

I should also point out that we aren't using lamarckian evolution, but rather pseudo-darwinian evolution. i.e.: mutations aren't based on what the parent generation did, but on what would produce the most succesful offspring. The main simplification is that we assume that only (or mostly) benifical mutations are possible, as detrimental mutations will be selected against and will not persist.

Sorry, didnt know, feel free to lock the thread