I'm making excellent progress on my PhD. I've posted a screenshot and some slides, but here's a new treat for you: an exciting PhD movie! It's 1.5MB, so I may not leave it up on the server for very long (at least a week or so though).
In it, you'll see four tribes of animats learn to compete with each other for territory. When it starts, each tribe is moving in a random, uncoordinated fashion, but by the end of the movie there are very clear borders and combat zones.
The whole movie is seven minutes long, so you may want to watch it at high speed. Please leave comments! I've been working on this for months now, and I'd love to answer questions or anything :)
Interesting movie.
1) Early on, some of the tribes (yellow and red) become badly fragmented. Why aren't they wiped out? That seems like a real possibility.
2) Later on, when stability seems to exist among the tribes, I notice that, for instance, a red animat will be in the blue territory, having crossed either the yellow or the green territory to get there. That doesn't seem to make sense.
3) The motion of the animats still seems random, even after their territories have become more well defined. Is that behavior expected?
All in all, interesting work.
1) Tribes can't be wiped out; animats don't die.
2) They can go wherever they want, territorial ownership only affects resource control and gives a slight bonus in combat (if you're on your own territory).
3) It's not random (as it must not be, given the territorial divisions). Plus, frames in the movie are around 1000 seconds apart. It's time-lapse.