elspood

Karma: 525

elspood Oct 6, 2021, 2:47 PM
3 points
in reply to: Measure’s comment on: 2021 Darwin Game—Human Garbage Dump
Of all the things, the coconuts were by far the most difficult to get anything to survive on. In my simulations, usually the coconut eaters that survived were also eating something else.
In theory, coconuts should sustain a 13.1 E creature; In practice, with such a small food source this size creature gets outcompeted at first by much smaller organisms that then get hunted to extinction by predators.

elspood Oct 6, 2021, 2:27 PM
3 points
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: 2021 Darwin Game—River
Ah, I read the wrong line. So yeah, we submitted the exact same creature.
There were definitely reliably BAD creatures, and certainly some reliably good ones, but a lot of variance based on the overall makeup of the population. I certainly didn’t expect so many total creatures to be submitted; there was a lot more variability in results with 500-creature populations. In 5000-creature populations, basically the only thing that ever survived was invincibles.
With this size population, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that your minimal invincible survived—and certainly wasn’t just luck that you arrived at its design. Give yourself SOME credit. :)

elspood Oct 6, 2021, 12:56 PM
5 points
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: 2021 Darwin Game—River
I submitted the exact same 10 speed leaf eater that you did, I just started it in the Temperate Forest. Luck of the draw that yours got here first, I guess.

elspood Oct 6, 2021, 12:50 PM
6 points
in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: 2021 Darwin Game—Human Garbage Dump
Damn, now I’m upset I didn’t spend more time thinking of a good name. A brown bear isn’t even a pure predator! Really wish I had called THIS one the Trash Panda, instead. :)

elspood Oct 6, 2021, 6:18 AM
1 point
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: 2021 Darwin Game—Tundra
Wait, are you initializing and running each biome separately? I expected all biomes to be seeded at once with the complete set of submitted organisms.

elspood Oct 1, 2021, 1:16 PM
3 points
in reply to: Measure’s comment on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
My definition of “minimal invincibles” here:
0 ATK, 10 DEF, 1SPD, Antivenom herbivore
OR
0 ATK, 0 DEF, 10SPD herbivore
These definitely win in a field of hundreds of participants. In my simulations, they were outcompeted by “less” invincible creatures fitting the invincible prototypes with 20-50 participants (200-500 creatures). I hedged my bets with a few invincibles, some hard-to-kills, and some things I found surprisingly hard to kill.
Also, my daughter’s creature, so she has a chance to embarrass us all. :)
Did anyone find a way to reliably crash the populations of non-invincibles with fewer than 200 creatures (a reasonable amount of confederates you could wrangle)?

elspood Sep 29, 2021, 10:14 PM
13 points
on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
Embarrassing story:
I spent a lot of time writing a fast simulator and testing all kinds of approaches. Today I let my daughter (8) design a species without really understanding the game mechanics...and it performed better than every other creature on the first try. Granted, I had to help her correct some obviously suboptimal choices, but still...let’s just say my confidence is not high.
I’ll precommit to suggesting a secondary scoring mechanism for bragging rights: not simply the highest total number of surviving organisms but the total energy of the organisms (population * base energy).
Good luck everyone!

elspood Sep 29, 2021, 11:28 AM
3 points
on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
Can you give a more specific deadline? What timezone?

elspood Sep 25, 2021, 9:29 PM
1 point
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
It would also be kind of a pain in the ass to change! :)

elspood Sep 25, 2021, 8:45 PM
3 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
Not what I’m seeing. Roamers start roaming before the encounters in each biome, then after every biome is processed, the roamers find a new home. So the roamers go a whole generation without competing or foraging. Is that not what was intended?

elspood Sep 25, 2021, 1:50 PM
1 point
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
I thought the same thing at first, but I think if the interact method is called with only one argument, then that creature ends up foraging normally. Since spawning depends on creature size and reproduction depends on energy, it seems equally likely that each biome will have an even number of creatures after each generation as they would odd. So this situation would happen whether roaming is occurring or not.
The tough situation is for carnivores; if they’re the odd one out, they’ll die, even if there are species that they could eat.

elspood Sep 25, 2021, 10:46 AM
6 points
on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
There is no initial check to see if a species can survive in its spawning biome. Obviously this doesn’t matter for breathing, but species could live in the desert or tundra for free without the corresponding traits.

elspood Sep 25, 2021, 10:25 AM
3 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
Ah, ok. So instead of competing in that generation, the individual roams.

elspood Sep 25, 2021, 3:56 AM
1 point
in reply to: Multicore’s comment on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
If my understanding of the code is correct, if the organism successfully roams, it basically spawns another copy of itself, leaving the original behind to compete in the source biome . That organism isn’t removed from the competition pool. Given the relatively low roaming rate, I’m not sure this makes a huge difference, but it doesn’t seem like it should be intended behavior.

elspood Sep 24, 2021, 10:32 PM
1 point
on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
Can you elaborate on the winning condition? I expect most biomes will have surviving species; will that mean multiple winners, or will the ultimate winner be the species with the most total biomass? How long will the simulation be run? I can imagine stable equilibrium conditions with multiple survivors, even after an arbitrarily large number of simulation rounds.

elspood Sep 24, 2021, 12:36 PM
2 points
on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
Spelling: *dEtritus

elspood May 14, 2015, 12:24 AM
−1 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015
Reading this reply, I was immediately reminded of a situation described by Jen Peeples, I think in an episode of The Atheist Experience, about her co-pilot’s reaction of prayer during a life-threatening helicopter incident. ( This Comment is all I could find as reference. )

Unless your particular prayer technique is useful for quickly addressing emergency situations, you probably don’t want to be in the habit of relying on it as a general practice. I think the “rubber duck” Socratic approach could still be useful, so this isn’t a disagreement with your entire comment, just a warning about possible failure modes.

elspood Feb 19, 2015, 9:26 PM
2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Interpersonal Entanglement
Isn’t there a separate axis for every aspect of human divergence? Maybe this was already explicit in asking if there is anything more complicated that romance for “multiplayer” relationships, but really this problem seems fully general: politics, or religion, or food, or any other preference that has a distribution among humans could be a candidate for creating schism (or indeed all axes at once). “Catgirl for romance” is one very specific failure mode, but the general one could be called “an echo chamber for every mind”.

The expected result (for a mind that knows the genesis of the catpeople) is that eventually the catpersons will get boring, but Fun Theory still ought to allow for exploration of that territory as long as it allows a safe path of retreat back into the world of other minds. The important thing here seems to be that we must never be allowed to have catpeople without knowing their true nature (which seems to be a form of wireheading).

elspood Aug 11, 2013, 6:56 PM
2 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96

It was hard to muster a proper sense of indignation when you were confronting the same dignified witch who, twelve years and four months earlier, had given both of you two weeks’ detention after catching you in the act of conceiving Tracey.

Given the fact that there is a Tracey, then that act of conception must have completed. So, either McGonagall caught them at exactly the right moment, or the Davises had just kept on going after they were caught...

No matter how it happened, this scene must have played out hilariously.

elspood Feb 11, 2013, 7:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Philosophical Landmines

If consequentialism and deontology shared a common set of performance metrics, they would not be different value systems in the first place.

At least one performance metric that allows for the two systems to be different is: “How difficult is the value system for humans to implement?”