My post is now a three-page thread. Sweet...

A number guessing game. Hmm... Thats a neat idea, I think I might try that myself.

Its not as if the program has a single guess. The point is that the program is told whether its guess is too high or too low. The idea is to see whether or not the program will find an efficient algorithm for narrowing down the correct number in the lowest number of steps.

I once wrote a number guessing game with a twist. Essentially, it did not pick a number, instead it had a range.

Say, 0 to 100

If you guessed 33, it would take a look at the possible ranges
0-32 and 34-100

Since 34-100 is a bigger range, it would tell you that you number was too low. So, it cheated by always telling you consistent facts but always picking the path which give you the least amount of information.

Guessing games are fine if the numbers are "randomly" generated by the computer, and if the AIs are given the information as to when the number was generated, how long it took, etc. Because we all know that there isn't a "truly random" function. Sure, it could be close, but if a computer can process the information to generate the number, can't it go reverse?

That's another interesting expirment. Give the program the seed value, and see whether or not it can find the result of rand().

I suppose it depends on what you are interested in. But it seems to me if you are trying to in some measure simulate actual biological evolution, this route cannot be used since in real life less-fit organisms die off.

Yes you should. That's the whole point with natural selection; the weak die and don't get to reproduce. Thus, if you want to evolve phrases, you're going to have to plain and simple kill off those that don't perform well.

Predators. Intra-species violence. Death isn't necessary for evolution, just the inability to procreate.

The whole point of this kind of exercises is to get the best "genes" to survive. In a controlled experiment, you know where you start (random chars) and where you want to be at the end (a coherent phrase). With such an specific criterion defined, it's quite easy to tell the good "genes" apart from the bad ones and thus the process is much faster.

It's purely a matter of statistics. Less fit individuals will by definition produce, on average, less offspring, so their genes will not spread as quickly as their more-fit brethern. So they `die off' gradually (but still quickly compared to an evolutionary timescale). This as opposed to them continuing to exist in the genepool until circumstances change.
Remember that species tend to be fairly homogeneous in their genetic makeup and tend to stay as they are as long as their environment stays constant, but can change quite rapidly if the environment suddenly changes (think of iceages favoring long hairs and thick hides, giving a slight edge to individuals with slightly longer hairs).

Yes, but the only mechanism I have for encouraging or discouraging is life and death. I can't do any more than that. And remember, I can't let everything live on, because my computer has finite memory. I want to do thounsands of generations with thounsands of new births in each generation. I can't afford to let them all live.
The surviving agents were randomly selected, but the probility was based on their score. So the poorer performers didn't just die straight away, they were just more likely to die. And the higher scoring ones were more likely to reproduce successfuly.
The dud breed did hang around, but just not for long enough to reach the next stable point.

One of the things I was going to do in my next attempt was to have them compete in a few different games, not just the one game. That way, they could afford to be good at just one game while they evolved towards a better solution in another game.
I would have them pair up to reproduce, and have kind of virtual geographic barriers appear and disappear between them over generations. That way, I would expect to start getting different species to appear. ie, different groups of agents such that if they pair up with one of their own species then the offspring will probably survive, but if they pair with a different species then it probably will not survive just because when the programs of different species mix, the result will not be good at any of the games.

Should be interesting.
But I don't have time for that now.

Not really. At least, not the for the system I made. As I said, the probability of survival was weighted against the score in the game; but it was also weighted against the number of agents in the world. I had the probilities balanced such that the number of agents was more or less constant. If it got to high, then living conditions got rough; but when it was low, pretty much anything could survive.
Generally you want to make it so that they are competing against each other, not against the environment. I mean, they should never just die out from not being good enough for the programmers standards! They should only die out if they are not good enough compaired to the others. Otherwise, they would all just die before they got anywhere.

But still, time is working against any mutation. A better way must be found in a relativly small amount of time because during the transition it will perform far poorer then its relatives who are not transforming.

I imitated your original experiment. I made a stack machine and took the item that was on the top of the stack as the guess. I then pushed a -1 if it was too high and a 1 if it was too low. I started with completely random ops, which resulted in my original ancestor aborting because it tried some illegal operations.

My mutation system has the possiblity of duplicating and cutting sections of code. IT appears that given enough time, all the code causing problems is cut out, so the little buggers end up being able to guess. They found a rather innovative solution the problem. One of my OPS was a stacksize op, it pushed the size of the stack onto the stack. Since everytime the program ran it increased the stack size by one, this ended up being a crude counting mechanism, guessing every option one by one. Which was enough to do better then the crashing and smashing relatives. However, as with your version, they never got past this stage.

Well, since humans used to live to about 30 years with some luck, our bodies haven't evolved to deal with being alive for 100 years.
But I wonder how long it will take before our genes evolve to adapt, if it ever happens. Humanity is so chaotic I doubt there is any positive evolution going on.

On the 30 years. I'm not sure thats actually accurate. The average life may have been 30 years, but thats majorly affected by large numbers of infant and children deaths. If you consider the life expectancy of a twenty-year old male (because females had a tendency to die in childbirth) I don't think its changed nearly that much.

So, we'd expect Evolution to stay stagnant for a while until some change changed the "rules of the game" forcing a whole new method to arise?