September 10th

Class Discussion Recap

Group 1: 

Improvements: made two more strategies 

Conditions: works will with increase with board size and cost of moving. Fails if food is scarce 

Jinesh: Zone approach: not out preforming old strategy. Splitting up board into zones for each organism. Communicate with with states to tell if zone is occupied, using bits to communicate location of zones. Has smaller pop them other strategies. Any strategy that favors reproduction decreases overall energy 

Vishwa: Recapped strategy. 

Hao: Decision tree approach. Create a decision tree based on information the organism has immediately. Will determine if the organism moves or reproduces. Each organism learns on their own. 

Group 2: 

Improvements:  Have a ratio, food vs. number of turns looking, the “healthy-ness” of the board. This affects if you are waiting for food around or looking for food. 

Conditions: have trouble with low costs of moving because being conservative about moving. 

Di: made improvements, moves based on hungry-ness and how healthy the board is. 

Lauren: Tried to stabilize the energy. Reproduce based on neighbors. Each organisms starts with a certain number of reproductions to try ad get more population against other organisms.  Look to implement state species communication. 

Sam: Estimating the state of the board (how much food is around). Recapped strategy. Did demo

Demo: Very Large board with sparse conditions: wait for a long time does not reproduce until about 1.5K

Group 3: 

Improvements: Generational states, different actions based on 

Demo: moves around, eats only when hungry. reproduce very slowly. 

Markus: Recapped strategy. Think of current strategy as switching between 2 behaviors, exploring and reproducing. 

Yigit: Recapped strategy

Patric:  Discussed improvements, in the beginning move around randomly until found food of a certain amount (as proxy for time) then reproduce faster. Equilibrate at 110k. Leave food alone unless the food is over a certain amount. Food situations is mostly an issue at the start. Reproducing is very costly.

Group 4: 

Improvements: Dynamic thresholds for actions based on the number of organisms around you. Communicating with states 

Tanay: This is not always the best strategy, you want to reproduce more as the board gets full. Moving in one way limits what the organisms can do. Try to estimate p & q. Should hibernate, minimize reproduction, and scouting. 

Franklin: Recapped initial strategy.  

Tiernan: Another problem is there is a population cap when current strategy. Sitting around is a non starter if there are other organisms on the board

Group 5: 

Improvements:  Tries to calculate the cost to do actions, and make decisions about that. organisms are not learning as well as hoped. Estimating p & q. ONly implemented communication if farmer is blocked in.

Demo: stays still for a while, reproduce to the north and move to the west 

Conditions: does not do as well with plentiful boards 

Tim: all communication is based on state. Working on data robustness. p & q are very important. 

Yang: The most important thing is to survive, whether to move or to stay still can be calculated with the probably. At the beginning you want to stay still and then once you move you want to and keep moving that direction. Should you eat food immediately or wait? You should wait, the longer you wait the more it will double and you will have more food to eat. 

Harjot: Recapped strategy  and presented improvements. Board size is not worth knowing. Have heuristic to determine when to reproduce. 

Group 6: 

Improvements: made a very defined farming structure with communication. Create multiple “types” of organisms: farmers, scouts, and soldiers. Has problems with “deadlock” where two farms will lock each other out. 

Conditions: sometimes goes extinct with less food. Does well with bigger board

Current Strategy: Structured colonies with different types of “organisms” 

Tanveer: Improvements and improvement demo. Energy remains constant at 30k

Hari: Summary: stayed still and reproduce. When organism moved around a lot it survived better

Demo: Showed diamond farm, and colonies. organisms make a checkered board like pattern.