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From: sa209@utb.shv.hb.se (Claes Andersson)
Subject: Re: Genetic Game
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References: <christian.02rw@darkin.demon.co.uk> <Cz7y6p.EoK@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: Sun, 13 Nov 1994 23:29:05 GMT
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In article <Cz7y6p.EoK@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> mjd4c@uvacs.cs.Virginia.EDU (Michael J. Daniel) writes:

>In article <christian.02rw@darkin.demon.co.uk>, christian@darkin.demon.co.uk (Christian Darkin) writes:
>> This is a posting about a videogame.
>> 
>> Remember `Space Invaders`?  Blocks of dumb, stupid aliens coming down the 
>> screen at you, waiting to get shot out of the sky.  All you needed to do 
>> was blast away at them until they were all gone.  Now imagine if they 
>> weren`t identical.  Imagine that each one was slightly different from its`
>> brothers.  Those aliens that survived for longest would be the best adapted
>> ones.  The slow, the weak, the passive would be the first to be destroyed.
>> Only the fittest, the most intelligent would survive.
>> 
>> And they would survive to breed.  From the last few aliens, the next
>> generation would be created.  Slightly stronger.  Slightly faster.  Slightly
>> fitter.  The offspring would become the next attackers.  And so on...
>> 
>> This kind of game would be the perfect environment for experimenting with
>> genetic algorithms and artificial intelligence.  After each new generation,
>> the resulting new species would be committed to disc so that every time the
>> game was played, the evolution would advance.  Over a period of weeks and 
>> months of play, natural selection would evolve better and cleverer 
>> creatures.  

>Have you actually tested this game?
>I think the second child to play this game will kill the hardest guys
>first, and easily beat the game.

>You see, GAs rely on a predictable fitness function.
>The children will win simply by changing the rules.
>Something the (current) computer is incapable of.


>The worst survive, and just get worse.


>Wishing you success,
>  Michael

 That's not sure! The rules are the games functions and they cannot be 
altered by anyone else than a programmer. The fitness function is quite 
simple: The one who survives lives and reproduce. But I agree that there 
ought to be quite a large genepool or perhaps not a completely randomized 
seed generation.

Claes Andersson. University of Bors. Sweden.
