Hello, I'm TV's Christopher Symonds. You might know me from such classics as “2 and a Half Threads”, “Special Victims Unit Testing”, and the mind-bending movie “Exception”.

Amazing: I make an off-hand comment about how I'm a loser who doesn't know how to debug and not 4 hours later, a tutorial gets posted on logging and debugging. IT'S LIKE MAGIC!

Today's impediment is that I do not have a million dollars…

Worth a shot. Anyway, I've implemented the genetically-specific behavior of my Sytizens, and thanks to the magic of LOG.Debug I've ironed out some (not all) kinks in my element. I need to be able to incorporate some randomness into the creation of the element, specifically in GetDefaultAtom function. I have an sos in to Trent on the best way to get a nicely seeded prng in that function.

Next up: Implement breeding. Now where is the Barry White function…

Stellar programming achievements today:

• Managed to get my Sytizens to take full account of their surroundings
• Managed to get them moving in a direction biased towards food (I think)
• That's pretty much it
• Oh, at one point I realized I was adding negative integers into an unsigned int variable
• Ah yes, and at one point I tried to divide by 0

So, not much progress today. I still have tomorrow, and the rest of what I need is essentially variations on things I've since figured out, so I'm hoping for a faster pace tomorrow.

Impediments:

• I'm concerened that even without conflict, my Sytizens tend to die very quickly now matter how kind I am or how much RES I have floating around. Sometimes it seems these things die surrounded by food, so I'm not sure what's going on there.
• I'm hesitant to have these guys gang up in any way, as that will likely be their death warrant given how quickly they can run out of energy and DREGs are slow to replace it unless I just saturate the map with RES.
• Without being able to do any kind of debugging, I'm flying blind here.

Forgot to update last night, so this is last night's update: Managed to get the good Sytizens of Paralta walking around and eating res and dying when they run out of gas. This was no small endeavor, and there were more than one “Aha” moments when I finally understood how some basic mechanisms of MFM work (like realizing that I have to keep re-writing the active Sytizen to the window if I want the new state to take effect, even if the Sytizen does not move). My poor wife had to endure me shouting at my Sytizens all night “Why won't you die?! I want you to die!” She looks at me funny now.

Today, I'll be forging ahead to get as many interesting behaviors as I can out of them before demo on Monday.

Tutorial done. Element_Sytizen draft is done. Didn't get to push ahead on research of Tom Ray as I'd hoped. Getting Ubuntu/MFM working at home was much more of an endeavor than I'd fooled myself into believing. I guess there's always next week. Until there isn't.

Just a celebratory news update: as of the timestamp I finally have the mfm built and running on an ubuntu partition at home. (MFM is painfully slow, however, at ~25AER) Now to figure out emacs and do the tutorial.

I'm a little behind on my news, but since last update, I've settled on a project and will move ahead with a study of parochial altruism and the evolution thereof with the hopes of pinning down a good fitness behavior that a robust program might engage in to ensure suitability in a resource-competitive environment. My presentation and the ensuing discussion helped reveal some potential pitfalls I might encounter like my approach to reproduction, as well as some great improvement ideas in having PA elements rove around in bands.

Today I had a great primer in developing for the MFM via Trent's boot camp. I think I've got my work cut out for me and it's a good thing that I only have essentially one element to develop.

This evening I am going to attempt getting a usb drive set up with Ubuntu to be able to boot from it.

This weekend I will be working on the Element_Creg tutorial and flesh out my element.

Still playing catch-up from 5 days out of town. Too early to feel like I'm drowning. Perused the options for ALife researchers and chose Dr. Thomas Ray. He seems really interesting; especially with lines like “My current research: The diverse set of psychoactive drugs collectively represents a rich set of tools for probing the chemical architecture of the human mind.” I read that one sentence and said “Sold.” I've found no additional time to get into the labs at school and play with the fishes. I guess I'm left floundering at 80kAEPS.

Read Professor Ackley's paper Altruism in the Evolution of Communication. Was relieved to discover that it was a different angle of altruism than I was thinking of. However, am still considering what lessons might be carried over to a study of a population of individuals sharing resources in varying degrees of altruism. Also, attempted to get MFM running through a putty session which was laughably unsuccessful.

Spent some time with Ezra in the CS lab playing with the fish and sharks. Best results so far only made it to 80 kAEPS. Have not hit on a stable solution yet. Strongly considering changing my research topic, but haven't hit on any bright ideas yet. Trying to think outside the box, but I'm not even really sure what the box looks like…

Today I made a people page for myself.

The Evolution of Parochial Altruism in Scarcity Systems

Specifications for Element_Sytizen

Abstract and Expected Outcome

I've selected researcher Tom Ray as my subject for the researcher profile section of the course.

The previous two ideas are, as you can see, both inside the box. This idea space is reserved for an idea that is outside the box. And when I've thought of one, I will put it here.

Feel free to leave a comment in this section. Don't forget your time stamp!