Seeing red

[bennyboy]

Imagine Robot Odyssey but with much more complex inputs and mechanisms: like sensitivity to varying degrees of different colors of light, different sound frequencies, etc.  Then hook it up to ANNs.

Could be a lot of fun, no?

I'm up for it if you are   But just to be clear, what would you like to do? Your evolution game involving these things or Robot Odyssey as a game with NNs? Because I'm not sure where the little man would fit in if the wiring in the robots of the game was replaced with NNs, unless you mean he could add neurons and connections, individually, in place of the 'soldering' he currently does in the game? Cos that could be interesting... kind of like Minecraft but with neural networks 

Nope, it would basically just be rock-paper-scissors applied to game objects to get a complex interaction among properties.  Examples:
-Aliens are random colors / attracted to different colors for "mating."
-There are game regions (or objects) where aliens of one color have an advantage over those of other colors
-There are random sounds / attractions / aversions to sounds
-There are game regions (or objects) which emanate random sounds

This is just two variables, but we can already see that: aliens which are attracted to mates in regions which disadvantage them will die out eventually.  Aliens which have an attraction to different sound regions will "pull" apart.

If we made sexual reproduction involving various degrees of child-caring, we'd find eventually that females either become more selective in looking for compatible males, or that they'd look for resource-rich areas that could support a gazillion offspring.

In short, I think with just a few variables, we could kind of simulate a narrow band of the evolutionary process. What if the most resource-rich asteroid was located in a purple zone, and emanated classical music? How many generations would it take for ALL the nearby organisms to prefer that place, that sound, and each others' colors?

This all reminds me of a question for Rhythm and Jorm: is the encoding in DNA an idea?