Battle for Survival v0.1.3

Since I tried to release as quick as possible this file wont be complete (by far). Please watch the website for newer versions. Also I would love to hear from people that have looked at this project. (see contact details below) Since I don't have a clue if people are interested in toys like this, I will let the amount of work put into it depend on the responses.

Menno

What is Battle for Survival

I got the idea for the program from game of life, and my interests in darwins theories. The game (or toy) constists of a set of rules simulating a world, where organisms 'live' in. I've tried to make it possible for organisms to be plants and to be animals, although there is no strict diffrence.

This project has several possible applications. First is as a toy or game. It can be great to watch what happens when several of those organisms struggle around. Hopefully other people will send me their own organisms so I can add them for everyone to watch. Also it is simple to program organisms yourself. However to make a good one has proven to be a great challenge. Currently not supported is human control of an organism, but it can be added in the futures (perhaps even multiplayer).

Another use is more scientific, the project can provide a base for research in the field of artificial intelligence and perhaps even biology (behaviour research).

Organisms take turns in executing actions. All these actions cost/give time, material and/or energy. The most important thing is making mass which allows them to specialise for diffrent actions. Examples of the actions are:
grow mass: costs energy and material, gains mass
move: depends on the masses that increase speed, costs energy
fight: attack another organism
eat: eat food from the ground
root: get materials from the ground: only possible if root mass is available
create offspring(create embryo)
feed offspring (before birth)
give birth (drop embryo)

types of mass that can be grown are:
root: to get materials from the ground (penalty for movement)
foto: (fotosythesis) to get energy
speed: to allow movement
figth: to fight
digestion: to turn food(= dead organism) into materials and energy
armor: better defence when fighting and harder to eat

Since these lists are incomplete a good way to start understanding the world is to look at Turn.java and Rules.java (both in src/surival/world/)

I have made a few test organisms and the rules seem to work quiet well. And I've got about 50 parameters that can be set.

The program is set up to allow concurrent development. The world allows for an unlimited amount of windows to be attached to view
and control the world. Save and load functions are working. Current windows are:
A picture of the world (showing where organisms are)
a listing of all actions taken by organisms
a control window (save, load, speed control)
a listing of the organisms
a listing of species to compare which one is winning
an overview to look at all details of 1 organism.

The first run

Here is what can happen on my first big test run, starting with 1 tree, in this text I will explain what the screens mean, and what actually happens. Since there are a few random actions done by the Tree, not all runs will be the same.

At the start only 1 tree was around. The tree is an organism that grows roots to get material from the ground and fotosynthese mass(leaves) to get energy. It grows what it needs most according to some simple rules. At an age of 800 turns it will start to put all effort into reproduction and finally at age 1500 it will die, due to the current maximum age in the rules. A new child will use its first turns randomly moving a bit away from the parent and then start growing like the mother did.

Now there are several screens to look at. First there is a list of all individuals that have lived. Clicking on them will show their statistics and the turn history which is a bit hard to read basically it describes all attempted actions. In the world view the red blocks indicates that there is 1 or more individuals at a certain point in the world, blue means empty space. There is also some debug information on this screen. Last there is the species screen. Now it is only showing 1 species, because by default only 1 is inserted into the wordl. It shows the totals of the statics of the all living individuals having the same ancestor. If the program is slow you can turn of some of the screens to increase speed, however the more organisms are around, the longer it will take to complete a full cycle of turns for all organisms. The counter on the main control screen indicates the amount of turns taken in this simulation.

Now on to what happened in the simulation. First the tree kept growing and growing, very fast. Since the ground is full of material it wasn't having any problem getting big. Then it reached the age of 800 and started to reproduce, very succesfully. Soon there is a red blob in the world view, indicating where individuals are, and the species overview shows hundreds of individuals, increasing at a high pace still. At turn 1500 the first individual dies of old age (it is also possible to die of lack of energy, but fotosynthese always gives energy, so trees don't die easily once they have grown a little bit). In the view of all individuals you can see some trees don't grow at all, those generally are at a location with little materials left in the ground(the last number in the line describing the individual).

The amount of living individuals kept growing, at turn 5000 the amount of individuals was 5500, all locations were filled with at least 1 individual. Now the size of the population was steady, very few new individuals got born. This indicates not many could get strong enough to reproduce. The amount of individuals starts to drop, and the average age they have goes up, it reaches more than 1200 at one moment. Again this indicates an old population with little children. The reason of course is that there is not enough material to maintain a population of theds size. In the time between turn 5000 and turn 9000 the amount of individuals dropped as low as 170, only every now and then a child was born. Interesting to see is that the location where the first individual started, thus the first blob was, is also the first one to be empty. At this time the amonut of individuals increased again, this time only until 3200 individuals. Fun to see here was that it was again from 1 point, so probably only 1 or 2 individuals have been the cause for this new big growt. After this it dropped again. At turn 13000 the population was only 200 and for the following time, until 27000 the amount fluctuates between 100 and 400 indivuduals. Again at some points as blobs of individuals. Finally around turn 27000 the last individual dies and the simulation is over with a total of 16651 individuals that have lived during the simulation.

Requirements/How to run the program