[crossfire] A funny thing happened on the way to the new maps

[Matthew Giassa]

It would be pretty cool. Reminds me of the AliceBot experiment 
(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/05/05/nice-robots-finish-first-simulation-shows-how-altruism-can-evolve/). 


Altruistic mice help anyone, regardless. Aggressive mice attack anyone. 
Tribalism-oriented mice attack only mice of other "tribes". Then you 
could have variations (sneaky mice pretend to be non-aggressive, then 
become aggressive after a random number of turns, then eventually 
regress to non-aggressive again), variations in the "viewing distance" 
(ie: range before monster sees another and becomes aggressive), purely 
defensive altruistic, etc.

You would need a reward mechanism for attacking other mice (victorious 
mouse gains an attribute). Then you could just reset certain maps to 
play around with initial conditions, like a Monte Carlo simulation. You 
could release a bunch of magical cats to clean up the mice population, 
then they disappear. Or, you could release pigeons to eat the mice, 
followed by lizards, snakes, gorillas, to make it really interesting.

100GB? All you need is a few people like me running the equivalent of a 
private OC3 to effectively saturate the pipe and rack up a hefty bill by 
setting the "pre-cache all maps on launch" option in the client.
DreamHost does some good private server services, but it's about $150.00 
USD per month.

Please keep us up-to-date on this. Sounds comical AND academic.

Cheers!

============================================================
Matthew Giassa, MASc, BASc, EIT
Security and Embedded Systems Specialist
linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/giassa
e-mail:   matthew at giassa.net
website:  www.giassa.net

On 04/01/16 22:16, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Apr 2016, Kevin Zheng wrote:
>
>> Sounds interesting. Any chance your server is online so I can take a
>> look at your new maps? I'd love to hear more about your 'interesting'
>> game dynamics with a big world (and lots of mice).
>
> I am looking at opening it up.  I was considering relocating it to a
> Linode but the 100GB storage is significant.  That's one of the reasons
> I'm thinking that compressed maps would be great - since they are all
> text anyway they compress really well.
>
> The server is currently at my house.  I'll probably open it up as a
> trial but not sure how well it will perform as I'm on DSL.
>
> I think Matthew Giassa's idea of using mice with different
> characteristics would be fantastic.  The world is divided in to several
> continents so I may reserve one for experimentation :)
>
> As we speak the mouse plague is steadily heading south along the road
> towards a major city.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rob
>