Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Swimbots

A few years ago a friend told me about Darwinlike artificial intelligence generators like Darwin's Pond. I became fascinated with a game called Swimbots. But a few more years went by and I couldn't remember the name of the application. I'd looked for it and failed with search engine results.

Last night I determined once again to find it. I played Darwin's Pond for a little while, but I was seriously jonsing for Swimbots. So I closed the game and finally found Swimbots. And I played until 4 AM. It's addicting that way.

In Swimbots each creature has only two goals. To eat (survival) and to mate (continuation of the species). Pretty soon I started to make some critical observations. If you can't find food quicker than your competitors, you die. So you have to be somewhat aggressive. If you are passive, food might randomly come your way (it self-generates). But while there is a lot of food at first (abundance), when the population grows the food gets eaten faster than it arrives and swimbots start to starve to death. So a hunter bot can survive better than a 'sit and wait' bot. Just like in life, you may find food and a mate if you just sit around and do nothing, but the odds are not in your favor.

Adaptability:

If your swimbot can not turn around and follow its goals, it will bump into a wall or a corner, get stuck there, and die. If your swimbot cannot move closer to the food particles, it will starve. Yet, if it is too streamlined and fast, it may also starve because it rockets past the food before it can open it's mouth to eat it. So being too slow is a liability, and being too fast is a liability. Just as in life, moderation is often the best course. If you move too quickly and spastically, you burn yourself out and die young. The wild Swimbots that thrash around live a short time. They use up all their resources. Life in the fast lane doesn't work if you are a bot or a human. Not for long anyway.

Chase the Right Thing

You can 'tweak' Swimbots to mate for various reasons. You can mate with only your own color. Eventually you get communities of Swimbots that are all the same coloration (red with black feet for example).

Last night at 4 AM I set the game up in "Froggies" mode. Every green bot looks the same, with one head and two long jointed scissor-like legs. But they don't act the same. Some swim straighter, others turn in circles. Some are lazy, others are hyper. I put the game on 'mate with your own color' and let it run until I got up at 10 AM. When I turned the screen back on, most of my spambots had turned orange and grown more joints.

You can also set it to mate with the opposite color, or to mate with only shorter or longer, straighter or more crooked partners. Left to it's own devices, this will change the entire population. Much like in real life, you have to be careful what you are chasing if you want to get to the right destination. Are you chasing money (food), sex (partner), creativity (opposites attract), or what exactly?

Another thing you can do in Spambots is introduce a random bot with completely different colors or characteristics of the existing population. I like to call this the wild card, much like in school, things change when you get a new student. So if you are bored in life, you have to throw something random into the mix. Or let the universe do that for you. A random event could be a new job, a new lover, a new house or a new religion. You have to mix it up if you want to escape the status quo. Then again if you like the status quo, I suppose you could annihlate any swimbots that don't match your dictatorship paradigm. Just keep in mind that if you create beings that can't be self sufficient they could die out.

In the Swimbot menu, you can zoom in on certain outstanding individuals. One of them is 'view most energy efficient'. These are the ones that go the fastest.

But my favorite is 'view the oldest virgin'. This is the unfortunate creature that either can't move at all and is stuck out in the middle of nowhere, or one that looks normal, but there is no no one nearby that meets it's 'dream date' list. Eventually these die out, sometimes sooner than later.