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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.

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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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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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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I changed my mind and posted this, just because I like the last line.

I tested a short-lived population, they made it to 923 in the name field, before dying out. I saved the first two figures of that line to play around with them.
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