My project and other ponderings

Hello All

First questoin i would like to ask is , is there a official artifial life body ? ive scoured the web many times and differnt organisatoins say theres is the offical site and hundreds of sites only linking or explaning to a few alife projects (like conways game of life). Also ive noticed the amount of programs that do the same thing , like a creature learning to walk in which ive must of seen 50+ differnt ones.

onto...

My project at the moment is being called project "beep". My intentoin is to create a well codid program that achives or does something differnt to many alife simulatoins.

The basic plan.....

is to create a simulatoin with two tribes of agents which will adapt to each other and be able to distroy each other through many means, through war (killing enemies) or resource capturing (starving the opposisitoin) etc etc

Advanced plan.....

the beeps....

Physical and enviromental factors.........

The beeps are artifical life agents , multibodys with wheels. they can interact with objects in three main ways , they can pick up objects , distroy objects , eat objects,claim gridsquare as there terratory. these will not be limitied to any object in the virutal world , but if a object is interacted with in a unique way posative and negative affects can be found. for example if a beep trys to eat food it will gain energy,if it trys to eat a fire object etc it will lose energy.

They will also have limited visoin, and there movement is based on a A* search algorythem which will patchfind it to any object it wishes to interact with . each beep will also be able to control there colour , as found in natures they can change there color to there "mood"

Mental structure ......

The mental structure is based on perspective reasoning through the use of a nerual net. the nerual net will be 5-7 layers and have differntial node partitoining. I hope that this will allow diffent tactical approachs to problems , for example many alife programs would say fire = bad , raw food = bad . by the use of differntial node partitoining i hope my beeps will learn fire = bad ,raw food = bad but fire+raw food = good. In some ways show signs on "planning on future events" which will be true but not becouse of deductive reasoning but becouse of experiances that will be shown in the nerual net weightings. To add to this my beeps will also have additoinal infomatoin which will help with "apathy"(i use the term losely). which will in simple terms would be "what would i do in that posistoin" which leads to the mood of each beep as shown by there color. This combined with "apathy" will hopefully lead to pack behavour. one beep will be able to tell through the "what would i do" of anouther beep. for example one beep might be red and the other beeps might interprite that as a sign it will attack the enemy , the other beeps may then try to take advantage of this.The last point to mentoin is that each beeps controlling happyness factor is also combined with the overall happyness of there tribe, so hopefully beeps will also be able to do actoins which could be unfavourable to themselves but possative to the group ( like claiming opposistoin terratory.

the enviroment......

the enviroment will be 2d based, no upper or lower levels, but will include walls and maze's each beep tribe will have there own color , if they claim a square the amount of food availbe to there tribe will increase, the longer they claim that terratory the longer it will take the opposing side to claim it for there side. also each side will have a base. if a beep takes food to the base it will allow bonus's for there tribe (like more food available or double the time it takes for there terratory to be claimed by anouther side)

User interatoin.....

initaly my project will allow the user to scold or praise each side , so if alot of posative behavoiur is being observed they can be praised so this behavour can be continued. in the future a networked versoin could be adapted so each use who have "trained" there side can face off against other players to see who has the superiour beep tribe.

End note...

any comments on any part of this would be appriated especially if anyones seen a program like this
before. Unfortantly the nerual network design will be kept secrative at this time for two main reasons (it might not work) and the design will probably need many alteratoins Although some trail tests of this network have proved very usefull in simpler simulatoins.When the simulatoin is finnished it will be made into a screen saver for windows and linux.

Thankyou for your times
NoZ