@kalan - I haven't been in class for 10 years, so that is a "no". It's just a little project I'm working on in my spare time.
King Harold wrote:
They look.. alive
How long did you run the sim before they were like this?
I think this run was only an hour or so. I haven't done any super-long runs since the frame rate drops pretty quickly as the networks get more complicated and I'm just too impatient! I can't really measure it in generations, since reproduction is random and occurs when someone else dies. The longer you survive, the higher your chances of reproduction.
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I still remember my AI assignment with more than a little horror.. We were supposed to use a neural network to play Othello, after several thousands of generations they still hadn't learned enough to beat me more than 50% (that was the goal) of the time (and I'm not even that good at it).
Yeah, it can take a long time - especially if there are lots of things they need to learn. It works best if you give them a single simple goal and reward them highly for it.
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But these bots rule! How much longer till they start hunting in packs?

Mmm... pack hunting. I guess we can dream!
This network also evolves the structure of the network (fully recurrent with sigmoid and LSTM units) as well as the weights, so I don't know if that's a plus or a minus. It definitely increases the potential, but at the expense of a vastly increased search space which = slow evolving.
I have posted
another video. There is an interesting point at about 2:40 where one of the bots sees some food right in front of a poisonous obstacle. Rather than go straight for the food and hit the obstacle, it steers just to the right then turns and swoops. It was probably an accident, but still - it looks cool!