Description
-----------
AVL stands for "A Virtual Life" and simulates microbes
which are able to learn.
The program shows two windows on your WB, one control-window
and one display-window (resizable).
There are several colors for the playfield, each represents
food or poison, and brings positive or negative energy
if it was eaten by an microbe.
At the beginning, the playfield is randomly filled with colors
and no microbe is there.
Now, you can position one or more microbes at any position on
the playfield.
The microbes are at the beginning dumb, the don't know *anything*.
That means, they have to learn first, what it is good/bad for them.
This is done by trial&error, they must have eaten first a color
to know if it was bad or good.
The microbes use the learned knowledge for controlling their
move direction on the playfield. They avoid bad colors and search
for good colors.
If a microbe as enough energy, it is able to get children.
Like a real microbe, this is done by cell-division, this means,
one microbe splits up in two microbes, each of the them has half
of the energy of the formerly microbe.
If a microbe looses too much energy, it also can die. The reason
for this could be, that the microbe had longer time no food (every
step needs energy) or that it ate too much "poison colors".
You also should know, that a microbe can see, but only one pixel
around it. If it sees within this one-pixel border a pixel
which brings energy, it will move to it and eat it.
During runtime, you have control over the microbes; you can draw
around in the playfield with every color (good/bad) and can even
place new life(s).
There is also a slider for controlling the "energy-less per step"
(Slider: EPS), and you can even conrol the global "IQ-level" of the
microbes (Slider: IQ).
The lower the IQ-Setting, the "dumber" is a microbe... it more often
forgets, if a color was good or bad...
A very interesting thing of AVL is, that you can even save/load
landsapes (playfields) to/from your HD.
This allows to define nice environments for testing the microbes.
I have included some example environments; load them and place
a new life on the marked place... and see what happens... ;)
Background
----------
AVL was first programmed some years ago in AMOSPro, and it then was
long time not used any more... recently, I wanted to see, how fast
the microbes can be if I use a modern programming environment - voila
AVL was created.
A funny thing, I want to meantion, too:
As the microbes can learn, I had a problem while implementing the first
version of AVL years ago: they learned, that every step costs energy...
And what did these beasty microbes do?? They stopped walking!!!! :)
Well, I had no chance: the only way to avoid this problem was to
prevent them from stopping... now they have to go! ;)
Features
--------
AVL...
o is small
o is fast
o is colorful
o has a professional and simple to use GUI
o can load/save landscapes
o is FREEWARE
Requirements
------------
o AmigaOS 3.x+ (tested with OS 3.1)
o A workbench running in more than 16 Colors.
(GfxBoard running with CyberGraphX or Picasso96 strongly
recommended)
AVL was tested with CGXV3, 1280x960x16, OpusMagellanII
Distribution
------------
AVL is FREEWARE. But I would be happy to get an eMail if you
like/use it or if you have any questions about this program.
History
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V1.00: (15.08.1999)
** first public release **
Author
------
Stefan Robl <stefan.robl@tirnet.de>
More infos about ArtecScan, PPCjpeg, the QBox and many
other cool Projects?
Just visit my Homepage: http://qbox.home.pages.de
or http://www.tirnet.de/~srobl
Have fun!
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