I didn’t trusty myself to reimplement the simulator—any subtle change would likely have invalidated all results. So simulations were real slow… I still somehow went through about 0.1% of the search space (25K of about 27M possible different species), and I hope it was the better part of the space / largely excluding “obviously” bad ideas. (Carefully tweaking random generation to bias it towards preferring saner choices, while never making weird things too unlikely.) Of course, the pairings matter a lot so I’m not at all certain that I didn’t accidentally discard the best ones just because they repeatedly ended up in very unfortunate circumstances.
There certainly were some kinda non-intuitive choices found, for example: A Benthic creature that can (also) eat grass—it can’t start in the river, but that’s where it wants to go; and travel-wise, Ocean/Benthic are equivalent! (Also, for some reason, others trying the same strategy in the ocean performed way worse… absolutely no idea why yet.)
I’d have loved for this to happen in a less-busy week (not exactly the end of the quarter year with all the bookkeeping) and to have about 2-3x as much time to get the infrastructure working… managed to barely get simple mutation working, but didn’t have time for the full genetic algorithm or other fancy stuff. :(
There’s definitely a rock-paper-scissors dynamic where smaller herbivores are more efficient than larger ones while being less resilient to predators. There could also be a strong random element if the total number of species is much higher than what the food sources can support and the RNG has to decide who starves first (not to mention the people who submit identical species).
I didn’t trusty myself to reimplement the simulator—any subtle change would likely have invalidated all results. So simulations were real slow… I still somehow went through about 0.1% of the search space (25K of about 27M possible different species), and I hope it was the better part of the space / largely excluding “obviously” bad ideas. (Carefully tweaking random generation to bias it towards preferring saner choices, while never making weird things too unlikely.) Of course, the pairings matter a lot so I’m not at all certain that I didn’t accidentally discard the best ones just because they repeatedly ended up in very unfortunate circumstances.
There certainly were some kinda non-intuitive choices found, for example: A Benthic creature that can (also) eat grass—it can’t start in the river, but that’s where it wants to go; and travel-wise, Ocean/Benthic are equivalent! (Also, for some reason, others trying the same strategy in the ocean performed way worse… absolutely no idea why yet.)
I’d have loved for this to happen in a less-busy week (not exactly the end of the quarter year with all the bookkeeping) and to have about 2-3x as much time to get the infrastructure working… managed to barely get simple mutation working, but didn’t have time for the full genetic algorithm or other fancy stuff. :(
There’s definitely a rock-paper-scissors dynamic where smaller herbivores are more efficient than larger ones while being less resilient to predators. There could also be a strong random element if the total number of species is much higher than what the food sources can support and the RNG has to decide who starves first (not to mention the people who submit identical species).