The things in this files are some toughts that came to me while reading the white pages. It might help the project or it might give you guys a good laugh (in any way, it can't harm you). Somethings I write might me obvious to you but keep in mind that I don't know anything about ai, and that I'm here to learn. (btw if some of you know any good methods / books / files for beginners please let me know and mail it to Elie De Brauwer ). These are just some things that crossed my mind, if you my ideas are cheap / crap, it is your good right and I personally won't mind it.
Like in our world I think we should equip an agent with an expanded visionary system. With this it should be possible to 'make colours' matter, like in our world (red = danger, green = safe, ...). This would make some things easy, like the act of 'mating'. The 'beautifuler' (exemple let somebody beautiful contain more blue in his outfit) they are the easier mating will be. The difference between males and females won't neither be a problem.
Another thing we could do with is colour is food. We could fill food with 100% red that would mean it has his full 100% percent of energy, only 50% of red would mean 50 percent of its orginally amount of energy.
If colours are used an agent should have 'eyes'. An agent can't see the entire world, let's say somebody with a perfect eyesight can see 10 units (define unit as x pixels ....). With these eyes an agent can see the distance to food and can decide to go for it or to leave it according to the effectiveness of the food according to the formula (level of red in the food)/(units from food)= effectiveness. The effectiveness would evolve according the following curve.
If there should occur an 'superagent' with this I mean an agent that can't be defeated by other agent and can only die by a natural cause and who's children also will be superagents we could simply insert daltonism into his genes. This would speed up his natural death (he would starve to death), he won't mate a easily because mates won't be easily recognized or females should initiate contact. And also his 'superoffspring' would be 100% carriers of daltonism which would prevent and entire superagentrace.
There is no computer which has unlimited resources so in order to make the program stable a maximum number of available resources should not be exceeded. So we should prevent an enourmous number of agents. In order to do this I think of two easy ways.
We could enlarge daltonism (or enlarge a crossing over factor which should lead to visual defects)
Or we could just put less food (or food which loses faster energy) in the 'world'. And within times of overpopulation we can devide the number of eggs (see 2.6) by two.
It think we should enter some factors (from which some can be herited and some learned). Like speed, strength, limberness (in order to dodge), strategy and intllegence which determine who'd win. We sum these point up (strength on 20, speed on 20, limberness on 15, strategy on 10 and intelligence on 10). Then we have 75 points, in order to reach a 100 we need another 25, i suggest we use a random for the remaining 25 (so invincibility can be avoided). When the two want to fight we compare the numbers and who has the highest 'battlegrade' wins the fight. (other issues like old/youn age, the need to mate, the need for energy,... can also take part, but like I said i'm just making suggestions).
Maybe the more intelligent ones (or everybody) should have the built in ability to gues an approching enemy his battlegrade (maybe we make de battlegrade colourdependant and make the ones with a higher battlegrade more attractive to females, so these are the fittest which would survive)
Suppose you walk around in your house, and you see food. But right know you're not hungry, you don't need the energy but you decide to take the food with you for when you get more hungry.
I'm just saying that we could built in the ability to carry food for a later time when it's more needed or when it can be used for the full
100%. This would dimish the battlegrade (because the weight increases).
Like told before partner selection can be based on the colour (and so on the battlegrade). There is also spoken of a variable number of eggs. I'd let this depend upon:
I hope this helped anybody in some way, I hope my ideas are worth something. If there are any comments or if I made some stupid mistakes please don't hesitate to let me know it, you can e-mail Elie De Brauwer or send an e-mail to the mailinglist of the project.
Written 31 july 2000