Beating Darwin: Accelerated Evolution in Thrive

A collection of my thoughts on auto-evo, after working on and pondering the topic for a couple years.
UPDATE: I've made more devlogs! • Atoms and Time Devlog 1
Play the results of my research here: raggaaa.itch.io/atoms-and-tim...
Background music by Oliver Lugg oliverlugg.bandcamp.com/album...
(specifically I used the aware, awakening, and microbe-1 themes)
This is the same person who made the video I reference, as if you didn't first learn about Thrive from there: • Thrive: The Evolution ...
Roseae made the spore like cretures. Go to / @roseae2202 if you want to watch...stuff. It's kinda biology related.
Everything else should either be a meme, public domain (special thanks to unsplash.com for mostly public domain stuff), or cited in the video.
#Thrive #Game

[@MrThimato]

For those of you interested in the results of my further experimentation, I've gone ahead with making something I can put on steam, and now it's got a page! store.steampowered.com/app/2603740/Atoms_and_Time/

[@thegammingbolaschannel7529]

I’m sorry did you actually make your own science based on Autoevo????

[@MrThimato]

@@thegammingbolaschannel7529 Well here's a question for you: what do you have to do to qualify as a new branch of science?

[@mercury5003]

The greatest thing that improved my gameplay in thrive was learning to ignore auto evo when the time came to gamble for better adaptations.

[@TheTrueForbidden]

Auto-evo hates me too!

[@WelcomeToDERPLAND]

I know I'd play and buy a fully fleshed out evolution game- the market is definitely there I think, remember how insane the hype for Spore was and even though it barely delivered on its promised features it still sold like hot cakes and was still dearly beloved by gamers. (myself included)

[@josephdonovan2216]

I loved the little animations in this- they had so much personality!

[@MrThimato]

all credit goes to Roseae! Check out their channel that I linked in description!

[@nebulasinthesky]

This is a great video! I am inspired to learn more about evolution now, thanks for that!

[@keirawillow]

May I recommend Forrest Valkai? He does amazing content, both debunking creationists in funny videos and also some more “pure” education videos on evolution

[@MrThimato]

@@keirawillowinteresting, I think you just gave me a new addition to my coding playlist...

[@justsomegoosewithinterneta4199]

I did not appreciate the mother roast good sir :

[@KnTenshi2]

This might actually work decently well to simulate evolution since it tends to be exploitation of new niches that drives evolution. Heck, predation (A killing/eating B, including herbivory) would just involve creating a new Miche tree with "Eats/Kills B" as the root node each time a new species evolves (and just deleting the tree when that species goes extinct). The hardest part would be figuring out how to dynamically assign or update a Miche tree with new nodes (or prune no longer valid ones). This is a really cool idea!

[@MrThimato]

In my fork of Thrive (I have a video about it) I experimented with exactly that: making a miche to hunt everything already in one of the other miches. A big problem ended up being infinite chains of predation miches, and two species that both scored high for eating each other!

[@KnTenshi2]

@@MrThimato lol. The only thing I can think of to fix that would be to impose a trophic level score or cost of some kind. But that would require building a food web and possibly keeping track of the population numbers (to partition out the "energy": too little total "energy" -> extinction). Which would make the whole thing far more complicated and brittle.

[@JerbilKonai]

@@KnTenshi2 One can go with an estimation: if plants generate 100 energy, then herbivores will get 10% of that energy, predators that eat herbivores get 10% of that 10% and so on for all levels of predators. (pretty sure I heard those numbers during school) Make buckets of the available energy and distribute that to the species. One could even make these buckets their own niche. And since this goes from plants up to hunters of hunters, it avoids recursive dependencies. Ftom there it is just about deciding what happens when a population has too little energy or what happens when buckets are left full.

[@natewec]

Awesome video, great production value and very interesting topic! Keep up the good work.

[@roseae2202]

It was awesome working with you! The video turned out really nice! Also it’s now cannon you’re a sassy disturbance. Sorry- 🤷

[@MrThimato]

I have accepted my destiny. My inner Disturbance no longer disturbs me.

[@roseae2202]

Glad i could bring out your inner you lmao

[@mercury5003]

"speaking as god" you say that which such confidence. Love that for you.

[@MrThimato]

I made these usernames before I thought I would want an online presence, and it's too late to go back now: raggaaa.itch.io/

[@Andrea_112]

Wow man, loved the video, put toghether very well. I hope this project continues to improve :)

[@MrThimato]

Thanks for letting me know! Hearing back from people is what makes it all worthwhile :)

[@dard1515]

On Natural Selection, scientists have produced studies that suggest mutations are not just random but biased. Theories of what it's based on vary

[@MrThimato]

That's very interesting, but annoyingly vague to base a simulation around!

[@Lolkek-fp4qy]

Root systems preforming different co dependent functions for the plants.

[@user-th6rg9yq8u]

The next milestone is making it 3d!

[@justsomegoosewithinterneta4199]

Wow that was cool. Good luck on the project 👍

[@Muenni]

13:42 Mutations in Darwinian evolution aren't completely random. Variation isn't solely introduced via point mutations. Even prokaryotes heavily skew where variation gets introduced, with some parts of the genome highly conserved, as changing them would likely lead to a catastrophic failure of the entire organism. They even use horizontal gene transfer to introduce new genes or alternative alleles of existing ones via conjugation (from the neighbours), transformation (from their neighbours' corpses) and transduction (going viral). Let alone highly complex multicellular eukaryotes, with such classics as sexual reproduction with 2 chromatids (haploid) or more containing duplicates of the genome with slight aberrations. Or crossing over to introduce additional variation, but again limited to remixing small parts of your genome between your two chromosomes from your own parents, before passing the recombinant DNA on as your half of the parenting part. Most mutations that would immediately be fatal are avoided, instead of relying on pure randomness and selection then sorting things out. Breeding is done by humans, which are part of the same ecosystem they're trying to change and their evolution influenced by it, so it's not fully artificial selection in the sense a god or computer programm might be able to employ. If we breed cows to produce milk for us, we also adapt to digest milk well into adulthood. So both completely random introductions of variation, as well as entirely artificial selection processes are severely limited in the real world. Doesn't mean your auto-evo (I assume from 'automated' not 'auto' as in 'self'?) is Dawinian evolution despite both not containing completely random mutations, of course. Though it might be: If only entire populations can mutate and evolve, not individuals, one might simply consider each such population as a single multicellular organism, with each individual representing one cell (albeit an undifferentiated cell, as all individuals in each population are the same, if I understand this correctly). Cells also reproduce when part of a multicellular organism, of course, just without introducing mutations (that might end up as cancer) - so that fits the analogy, I think.

[@memeboi6017]

Honestly seeing the beautiful world god made for us (by evolution BAPTISTS), and seeing the complexity of it all, it truly deepens my appreciation of biology.

[@MrThimato]

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

[@durandalturner1831]

9:16 "Mutational Precision" would be a compound rather then a phrase in my opinion, so yes noun is appropriate.

[@erinkarp]

Miches is a very cool concept

[@zixvirzjghamn737]

8:32 I thought it was for them to damage any prey they couldn't engulf on the way out

[@MrThimato]

huh...eating with your butt. I feel like I'd rather check if I can digest something BEFORE putting it in my mouth, but I won't judge...

[@Sea_Leech]

You used me as an example!! 4:11, this means i can die knowing i was in a video

[@MrThimato]

Dreams do come true!

[@ethankennan212]

1:54-2:12 Don’t quote me on this, but I wonder if it has something to do with the water and nutrient composition of the soil the roots of each plant species grow towards, and specializing to send roots to different spots in the same patch of soil with slightly different compositions. Again, just speculation.

[@MrThimato]

hmm, maybe I should dig up a chunk of my yard to check this out...

[@wastucar8127]

Great video!!!

[@johnsmiff8328]

Have you tried making major changes that marginally increase the accuracy of the simulation, but take forever to implement and are orders of magnitude more computationally expensive?

[@MrThimato]

lol I sense snark

[@johnsmiff8328]

@@MrThimato Why don't you just load a library of all characterized enzymes, extrapolate it to all possible enzyme chemistries, simulate many various arrangements of possible metabolic pathways, and iteratively select organisms based on simulated biomass accumulation. Save high performers in a database for later so you can sell these predicted high performing metabolic arrangements to companies working on biofuels. Then just make a front end that pretends to be a game like cookie clicker and use other people's computers to mine metabolic pathways. Have you tried just simulating every atom? 🤓 why doesn't your game include real prediction of molecular binding arrangements? You should at least be simulating real 3d membrane dynamics 🤡

[@johnathanegbert9277]

Oh sure. TOTALLY snark.

[@kitrana]

gah i hope i am not to late, this tech demo sounds interesting i will give it a spin.

[@MrThimato]

ohh, it's happening!

[@thepotatolordtorulepotatos7220]

I am going to keep up with this also if it works on Chromebook’s I’ll probably try it out so good luck and keep it up

[@MrThimato]

Please let me know if it works! I don't have one and won't buy one for this little project, so that would be good data on Thrive's future ability to work on small computers.

[@anonymoususer4968]

cool video

[@MrThimato]

thanks, I've got more now!

[@morgan0]

is there an autoevology discord or discord about these ponderings? i’ve thought a bunch about this for a game i’d like to someday make (less about evolution during gameplay and more about creating a realistic biosphere) so while it’s not tested in practice, it’s something i’m pretty interested in, along with simulating approximate plate tectonics (again for making realistic worlds)

[@MrThimato]

I would go to the Thrive discord to chat with likeminded people discordapp.com/invite/FZxDQ4H the community and dev forums for Thrive also have lots of thoughts on evolution and autoevo, if you're tired of trying to pause over and over again to read that forum post in the video.

[@bradtrooper5978]

👍

[@justsomegoosewithinterneta4199]

Thrive

[@bingusbongus9807]

is it possible for a species to change how it acts in its environment but not genetically, like if its lower leaves are eaten alot it stops growing them but it still has those genes so its children will still grow low leafs, this general nature that listens to environment heuristics would allow species to better during change as they could maximize multiple niches as the same species and also niches of combinations that dont exist yet

[@MrThimato]

Do plants learn how to do that? You might be teaching me some biology facts right now.

[@bingusbongus9807]

@@MrThimato i know plants do this for sunlight, they choose where to go using the sun from the environment without it being hard coded, they have genes that shut down growth in the presence of light which means the light side grows slower and the plant leans towards the light, this is also why counter intuitively plants grow faster in the dark, at least until they die

[@LordIrisofNecropolis]

@@MrThimato I can take this a little further: ​I once visited a dam that was surrounded by a pine forest with my family. If you've ever seen a pine tree, you know how dense the foliage around them is (think christmas trees). The edge of the dense forest was a solid wall of pine needles and branches, thick and bushy all the way up, but then you push the branches aside and step through and the world changes. You enter a fairly clear, shady forest of perfectly straight, bare trunks that reach up to the canopy where the very tops have a large cone of pine needles. The entire forest floor is covered in brown needles, but there are no branches at all. When you look at a pine forest from above, the dark green canopy looks solid, but it's totally hollow inside. The lower branches are left to die and fall of, left to rot in the shade. It's a kind of self pruning to save energy, an instinctual response to low light intake of the lower leaves. All pine trees can grow and be a christmas tree shape, but lots of people struggle maintaining them as they self prune in low light to save energy as they age. This is capitalised on by microbial decomposers, but the pine needles themselves create a highly aerated leaf litter that also acts as a natural weed killer. This, along with the tendancy for pine roots to be shallow, numerous and very competitive for nutrients and water, prevents other plants from growing under them. Naturally, all this means they are great at surviving, while also preventing soil erosion, providing a cool, shaded environments of low wind for animals, provide food for some of those animals, deter some predatory animals from approaching due to their needles, and being evergreen means they can provide all of their benefits the whole year round. A very good environment for all kinds of birds, bats, squirrels, insects and arachnids. These are the kinds of trees that create an environment of their own and invite other creatures to live in it. It's almost magical.

[@MrThimato]

@@LordIrisofNecropolis That's very interesting, and I wouldn't have guessed it. As a part of my next video I'll be discussing how the way organisms make ecosystems for each other is making my job harder as a coder.

[@emersonvae]

One comment on your editing: please don't go from a back screen straight to a white screen. I got flashbanged 4-5 times.

[@MrThimato]

Thank you for letting me know about this. Burning people retinas was the last thing I wanted to accomplish with this video, and I'll ensure I don't do this with any future videos.

[@ikkePunky]

Make the real game. Just the evolution aspect of the game wil be interesting for Shure.

[@MrThimato]

ohh, it's happening. I've already got four devlogs up, and a steam page.

[@abi_art]

nah id adapt -mahoraga

[@jk0273]

👍