Well, i just started working on a genetic algorithm experiment or whatever
There won't be any kind of fittness just die or to survive which is kind of real natural selection.

What i gonna do is to create a village with max. 400 villagers.
Each villager has an own job, an own way of living (when doing what), a hobby he likes the most, a familie (housemates or however you call it), gender (male female) and an individual look (hair, clothing).

I will not generate random genes (except for the look) at the beginning, so they are at first all the same fintie state machines.

Each villager has its own phenotypes and genotypes and some jobs or whatever are recessive or dominant ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel ). Which is in my opinion a more realistic way of simulating people ^^

The GA will even include when he does what and at which point he is going to eat to prevent him from dying.

With the job the family gets money and so they can buy food for themselfes, then someone has to mkae the food ready to eat, so they can eat it
And it is nearly the same with water: They have to buy it and drink it ^^

One important thing is that they can't buy water if nothing is in the store, so the jobs will have an affect on the hole village.

So those are the states:
Play -> hobby
Work -> job
Sleep
pray (in church)
meet friends
eat
cook
drink
buy food
buy water
make love ( )

Jobs:
Watergetter
farmer
nothing
merchant
thief (rare)

Skills which affect the health
fun
thirst
hunger
sleep

Each bot will have its own personal assets in the genes so for someone they like it easier to fall in love with them

Now i just finished the 2D-world script to display everything an now i am working on th e pathfinding... I think i may post a demo of the pathfinding stuff tomorow so you can play a around with one npc

Now i am tired and want to sleep so here is a screenshot

and here a world bmap i used


Have fun
Omega

EDIT: Damn i forgot one thing, they can get better in their jobs by reading books, so they will earn more money

Looking forwards to your results, I dont recall anyone actually developing along these lines so it would be fantastic to see it done.

omega, sei mir nich böse, aber wieviele projekte haste nebeneinander laufen??

jaja, ich weiss, ich bin selber nich besser. lol

two suggestions:

make a fittnes function, based on the amount of "needs" beeing fulfilled.
For example:
no hunger/no thirst = 50%
having a falimily life = 20%
having a good job =20 %
having religious bonus (praying) = 10%

this way, the villagers will be selected at not just surviving by eating and drinking,
else there is not selection-pressure to do the other things.


Also you should not use a pathfinding (the village know how to reach the locations automatically)
Else the simulation will get quite slow, and thus the evolution is progressing quite slow.

The pathfinding could be developed by seperate genes is a seperate simulation.

@Damocles

Why should pathfinding be a seperate simulation? Its no different than the states he has already given the villigers beforehand, its part of the basic building blocks of viligers. So if you want to create an algorithim on the fly for pathfinding, you will end up with lots of dead viligers in the beginning, which make them not viligers but more simple bacteria. Since they are viligers I assume they are given these things beforehand.

I dont know if you should necisarily stay away from Pathfinding unless you can make it very efficient with a small amount of nodes/tiles.

I dont quite understand the whole GA reason to make a simulation like this. Everything is still predictable, if only just different colors and different attributes in later generations, unless my scope is nearsighted. If so could you explain what is possible for later generations?

Could natural born leaders emerge from the village? Could they learn to use weapons and train an army from young men? Could they work collectivly to research new technologies?

I suppose the pathfinding is some kind of finding a way
from tile xy to another tile xy.
And the village having more than 10 tiles in x and y direction.

Evolving a pathfinding without any "precoding" of how
it should work will use huge amounts of "evolution-time"


The simulation would take forever to bring meaningful results
(especially if the fittnes function is just live or die)
-> the first hundret thousand of generations would simply die, trying
to find any meaningful path to move on.

"you will end up with lots of dead viligers in the beginning"
exaclty that. But how are you supposed to select the fittest then, if
everyone is making sonesense. Evolution needs not just mutation, but also selection.
But selection means that there is are at least two parts, a good and a less good (bad).
If everyone is bad, there is not much to select.


GA can do lots of things, but the simulation must allow
the GA to solve that in a reasonable time.

Evolution is a type of search algorythm, where selection is the heuristic (evaluating
the quality of the direction) and mutation is the progression-step in the search.

-> roughly translated to A* : the "selection" is the heuristic
determining if the next step is a lower eucledian distance than the previous,
and "mutation" is the step going to another node/tile.
A* can remember past moves, but evolution forgets them at each new step.
So you need at least a heuristic to keep a senseful direction.

arent they just cloned FSMs with just "copied then altered" variables from their parents?

The villigers do get better as you say. So the first generation men would for example be very bad at fishing, and as they make childeren and generations, the kids would be experts at fishing right? But they wont be able to make their own pastimes or recreations, since every activity is premade. Wouldnt just a simple copy and paste from Dad's hairline and add a random number be enough?

Im not just talking about your game so dont take offense, but I'm talking about these simulations altogether. Everything in the end is still predictable, and if its truly emergent, then it might crash the computer.

this seems to be made with rpg maker xp, and this could possibly be interesting