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
Karma: 525
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.
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)?
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!
Can you give a more specific deadline? What timezone?
It would also be kind of a pain in the ass to change! :)
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?
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.
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.
Ah, ok. So instead of competing in that generation, the individual roams.
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.
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.
Spelling: *dEtritus
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.
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).
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.
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?”
[edited out emotional commentary/snark]
If you can’t multiply B by a probability factor, then it’s meaningless in the context of xB + (1-x)C, also. xB by itself isn’t meaningless; it roughly means “the expected utility on a normalized scale between the utility of the outcome I least prefer and the outcome I most prefer”. nyan_sandwich even agrees that 0 and 1 aren’t magic numbers, they’re just rescaled utility values.
I’m 99% confident that that’s not what nyan_sandwich means by radiation poisoning in the original post, considering the fact that comparing utilities to 0 and 1 is exactly what he does in the hell example. If you’re not allowed to compare utilities by magnitude, then you can’t obtain an expected utility by multiplying by a probability distribution. Show the math if you think you can prove otherwise.
It’s getting hard to reference back to the original post because it keeps changing with no annotations to highlight the edits, but I think the only useful argument in the radiation poisoning section is: “don’t use units of sandwiches, whales, or orgasms because you’ll get confused by trying to experience them”. However, I don’t see any good argument for not even using Utils as a unit for a single person’s preferences. In fact, using units of Awesomes seems to me even worse than Utils, because it’s easier to accidentally experience an Awesome than a Util. Converting from Utils to unitless measurement may avoid some infinitesimal amount of radiation poisoning, but it’s no magic bullet for anything.
I think what you mean to tell me is: “say ‘my preferences’ instead of ‘my utility function’”. I acknowledge that I was incorrectly using these interchangeably.
I do think it was clear what I meant when I called it “my” function and talked about it not conforming to VNM rules, so this response felt tautological to me.
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.