I’ve come up with a mixed bag of modifications to my artificial life system. I’m trying to get my digital creatures, which I call “figures,” more stable, quicker to emerge from randomness, and better able to tolerate mutations. As far as quicker emergence and greater stability goes, the tricks are working out. The system as gone from requiring multiple runs of 8 to 12 hours each, just to generate one stable population; to a system that can make a stable population consistently in less than 15 minutes, usually less than ten, and often less than 5. As far as tolerating mutation goes, it still isn’t any better. One single mutation is still enough to kill off the entire population, no matter which trick or combination of tricks I use.
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22 :: Sunday September 2, 2018

I need to jot this down before I forget.

I only just yesterday got the fat ports to work. I’d been calling inner write on the baby figures before they were added to the realm. That meant there were no trackers connected to the baby figures when their safe random method got called. All that time, I was just running the system more or less like the fat ports weren’t even there. Once I fix that, it ran like a dream.
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I spent a couple of weeks testing a notion I had. I’m not going to bother explaining—it would take too long for something that I’m not going to use. So far as I can tell, what I did to try and increase the system’s stability made it even more fragile. For example, with the usual approach, as few as 5 mutations have wiped out an entire population. With the other method, what I called snapcom, the one I’m tossing out the window, one mutation was enough. I gathered some statistics, but the results were inconclusive. Still, even if it is somehow performing better, it’s not enough better.
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