Release notes for Genesaver
http://www.leadtogold.com/software/genesaver/index.html
Genesaver is an artificial life experiment in screensaver form. It consists of a large number of
creatures competing with each other for survival and reproduction, modifying their behavior by
passing slightly mutated genes to their offspring. Each creature's behavior is governed by a neural
network with 14 inputs, 48 hidden neurons, and 4 outputs. Neural network weights and thresholds,
as well as the creature's role in the food chain, are all part of the genome, and subject to change
in any offspring the creature might have.
Refer to the home page (linked above) for more information.
CHANGE HISTORY
Change 3051 on 2003/04/03 by sam_stafford@sam-luey-gs
Added Genesaver to the Perforce Public Depot. It's not in
any way Perforce-related, but it shares a little bit of
code with Jamgraph, and it feels wrong somehow not to have
all my projects in one place.
Change 3917 on 2003/03/07 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Apply chase-cam rendering changes to plants - oops.
Shuffled that chunk of code up into the "Thing" class,
since nothing there is different at this point between
the Plant and Animal classes.
Change 3916 on 2003/03/07 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Provide option not to clip chase-cam view to visual range.
If antialiasing is enabled and chase-cam view isn't clipped,
creatures out of visual range will be drawn at 0.2 alpha,
which looks pretty cool.
Change 3915 on 2003/03/07 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Remove world boundaries. Creatures can now see around
the edge of the screen, and the chase-cam view will behave
as though the universe were continuous.
Change 3845 on 2003/02/24 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Allow creatures to be scaled, thus effectively
increasing the world size.
Change 3844 on 2003/02/24 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Settings improvements:
- Categorize settings in config file by type
- Precompute settings where appropriate
Change 3837 on 2003/02/23 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Configurable zoom level for world view.
Skip graph points that involve division by zero.
Change 3830 on 2003/02/20 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Make motion cheaper in the Jungle ruleset.
Change 3829 on 2003/02/20 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Make a unique graphing mode for the Jungle that better reflects
its unique ecology. Boost the numbers on Conflict() to make those
carnivores cull each other faster.
Change 3823 on 2003/02/19 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Tweak Jungle: restore plant growth to normal levels, but cut down
carnivore energy intake to 1/3. Herbivores thus have the normal
levels of competing herbivores, but are 1/3 as threatened by carnivores,
which balances the fact that in the normal World, only 1/3 of the
carnivores on average are a threat.
Fix overflow bug in graph: make gticks an int so it can exceed 2^15.
Add distinct line-antialiasing setting so it can be turned off without
disabling it for polys.
Fix rendering bug in Lizards that made them too green.
Change 3817 on 2003/02/19 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Redo conflicts to make sense in Bizarro World.
Fix old bug in sensory inputs. This will once again
break existing creatures (carnivores will track their
natural predators and probably go extinct).
Change 3816 on 2003/02/18 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Reinstate old "weird ecosystem" as an optional setting.
Change 3812 on 2003/02/18 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Force redraw when switching to graph mode.
Change 3795 on 2003/02/17 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Enable antialiasing for lines.
Add new "shading" setting that controls smooth shading.
Shade graph based on carnivore:herbivore ratio.
Change 3792 on 2003/02/16 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Draw speed lines in world view as well as in chase-cam view.
Change 3780 on 2003/02/14 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Make graph resolution configurable.
Change 3779 on 2003/02/14 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Fixed another bug in speed line rendering.
Decreased chance of synapse pruning to D_M / 255.0, which is
roughly equivalent to the chance of a given synapse being
randomly mutated.
Render synapse with brightness proportional to the signal
it's transmitting.
Change 3777 on 2003/02/14 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Render synapses that aren't currently firing at half brightness.
Change 3776 on 2003/02/14 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Decrease the chance of actually pruning synapses, but don't
render any synapses that are pruning candidates.
Change 3775 on 2003/02/14 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Further synaptic pruning work. Pruned synapses now no longer factor
into firing calculations - a neuron's value is now based on the
average of non-zero-weighted synapses only.
In addition, new code has been added to randomly prune synapses if
they only link to neurons that never fire.
Change 3772 on 2003/02/13 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Move speed lines back a bit.
Change 3771 on 2003/02/13 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Fix minor bug with brain rendering.
Increase chance of zeroing-out for synapses,
but eliminate it for other genes.
Change 3760 on 2003/02/13 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Optional cheesy "speed lines" in chase-cam mode.
Change 3759 on 2003/02/13 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Rework input synapses - feedback neurons are now treated like
any other pair of input neurons, which allows individual lobes
to connect to any pair of input pairs they like. Also removed
overloading of input genes and gave input weights their own
genes.
This change BREAKS old genomes completely since the H-chromosome
got bigger, so I advise just throwing your Genes.txt file out
before upgrading.
Change 3758 on 2003/02/13 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
A wee change to neural inputs: stop feeding in the diet. And stop
rendering "black lights" in the chasecam.
Change 3755 on 2003/02/12 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Track population graph even when it's not being rendered.
Change 3754 on 2003/02/12 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Fixed brain bug - right eye wasn't hooked up.
Change 3753 on 2003/02/12 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Provide a 10% chance for a mutation to "zero out" a gene. Should
lead to faster pruning of useless synapses.
Change 3752 on 2003/02/12 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
New "graph" camera mode, and keyboard controls for switching modes.
Change 3744 on 2003/02/11 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
New "chase-cam" render mode displays one creature in
detail, including energy meters and neural activity.
Toggle-able in settings file.
Change 3724 on 2003/02/09 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Finalize settings. The "settings" button in the Windows screensaver
panel now pops up the settings form in Notepad, since I didn't feel
like making a real Windows dialog.
Change 3722 on 2003/02/08 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Settings. Currently only accessible by directly editing .cfg file.
Genesaver now always cd's to system32 directory before doing anything.
The main purpose of this is to make sure we use the same .cfg file for
everything, but a pleasant side effect is that we don't leave Genes.txt
files all over the hard drive.
Unix ports should probably use ~/.genesaver or something instead.
Change 3680 on 2003/01/30 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
- Fix bug with DNA mutation.
- Redo color flashes. They look cooler now.
- More filename changes (change temp file to Genes.tmp)
- Add acknowledgements to About box.
Change 3657 on 2003/01/28 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Lower "overcrowding" threshold from 1/10 to 1/4.
Render animals with cyan tails on birth, yellow when fighting.
Change 3651 on 2003/01/28 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Make sure herbivores don't eat carnivores. (Fixes a sign error.)
Change 3650 on 2003/01/27 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Implement carnivore competition. When the number of carnivores
outweighs potential prey by more than a factor of 1/10, carnivores
will start to kill each other on contact.
Also change energy intake to be deterministic - rather than a random
chance to completely ingest food, creatures ingest a portion of the
victim's energy, with that portion being determined in a fashion
similar to the probabilities that were used before.
Finally, change exec name to Genesaver.scr, and DNA file to Genes.txt.
Change 3633 on 2003/01/25 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
When mutating a gene, have a 50-50 chance of increase vs. decrease.
This makes it easier to climb towards an extreme.
Change 3628 on 2003/01/24 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Carnivore balance issues:
- Drastically reduce nutritious value of meat.
- Make carnivores tougher to eat than herbivores.
Change 3601 on 2003/01/21 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Move from 4-color ecosystem to 3-color.
Two-color equilibriums will now be impossible, which should
lead to more interesting simulations.
Change 3595 on 2003/01/21 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Animal::Animal() - Use random chance to settle ties between color genes,
rather than defaulting to whatever I happened to type first.
Change 3593 on 2003/01/20 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Wow, big bug with vision. Hope it's fixed now.
The problem lay in my having done too many physics problems that lay
solely within Quadrant I. Suffice to say that nobody could see anything
that was to their absolute left.
Change 3591 on 2003/01/20 by samwise@samwise-luey-gene
Big bucket of fixes:
Fix bug with exporting "diet" genes in H-chromosome.
Fix antialiasing to work on Matt's problem machine.
Make diet more mutable via a single gene.
Randomly spawn random creatures about every 100k steps.
Fix neural inputs to relative roles, not absolute colors.
Shrink creature/plant size, increase plant spawn rate.
Add about box.
Various balance tweaks to global constants. | # | Change | User | Description | Committed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 3052 | Sam Stafford |
Add Genesaver to the Public Depot. It's not in any way Perforce-related, but it does share a bit of code with Jamgraph, and it feels strange to have an open-source project that's not in the PD. |