How long have you been breeding ducks?  What kind of controls do you keep in place to monitor breeding? 

How do you rear the young?  Or are you going complete natural, just imprinting them with home and hoping for the best?

Also, do you keep any charts or records regarding the rats?

I'm all about research, and I'm hoping to benefit from the experience of others, I've got lots of learning that I've done but basically zero experience and I want to compile a series of useful guides for myself to reference in three months or so in order to temper my ADHD and keep me focused on what matters.

Generally, I binge learn and then get distracted by new projects, but I really want to stick with this one in the most methodical way I can. 

Any other user's input would be greatly appreciated as well, doesn't matter what species you've bred, I am just want to learn general best practices.

BODY SPACE - the relative positions of stimuli compared to our body, this is distinguished from LOCAL SPACE by the relative positions of objects/stimuli in relation to a creature

HEAD SPACE - The relative position of a stimulus compared to the current location of our head. moving the head will cause the stimulus to appear to move in relation

RETINOPTIC SPACE - the total visual field of the creature, everything within a cone of vision emanating from a point centered between the eyes as represented by a 2d map of X and Y coordinates (technically only one eye exists, the appearance of two eyes is merely cosmetic) in terms of YIN passed from the body, ears, or memory a stimulus can be outside of the visual field thereby requiring the head and possibly the body to turn in order to fixate on it with the eyes, depending on how far out of range and how SALIENT it is.

RECO - the object recognition and learning map

SALIENT/SALIENCE - how significant a stimulus is

SACCADE - tiny darting movements of the eyes. Whatever is most SALIENT will cause our focus to to fixate for a moment until the next SACCADE shifts it elsewhere

With that out of the way, lets first direct our attention to local space. As you can hopefuly see from my terrible diagram, the creatures exist in the center of a 3x3 mental grid. The size of the grid is determined by the size of a creature's visual field, each square of the grid is exactly the same width as the widest point in the creature's visual range so as long as the creature remains within the central zone of the grid, it can never see beyond it. Any objects or other creatures within local space will be remembered even if they are behind it or otherwise out of visual range. A creature can wander freely in the central zone of the grid, but as soon as it crosses the boundary line, the grid gets shifted by one space in order to keep them within the center, this has the additional effect of causing objects that they move away from to be forgotten (not truly forgotten as deeper parts of the brain still remember them with less precision, more like "out of sight, out of mind.")

The reason that all of this is important is because a few compromises have had to be made when it comes to the visual recognition systems of our creatures. No one owns a computer capable of pixel perfect vision or ray-casting for multiple instances of creatures within the same world all at different perspectives, so Steve has figured out a way to simplify it without cheating too much.

Okay, so the cheaty bit goes like this. All objects within the 3x3 local space are plotted out as points on the grid and each one is assigned a SALIENCE regardless of it's position or visibility. These points aren't the actual objects themselves, just an assortment of facts about them. That is to say, when a creature looks at a carrot it will not see the same carrot we do, it will receive information about it (a sense of orangeness, a sense of plantness, a sense of longness, skinnyness and several other identifying characteristics represented as numerical values which can effectively be plotted onto other maps.)

This information is passed through a series of "daemons", these daemons do basic calculations on each object to determine how important it is. Essentially all of the objects in the local space are competing for attention and the winner decides where the eyes will land at any time. once the eyes saccade to the object with the most salience, they will remain fixated for a moment and it's salience will begin to drop. This in turn allows for another stimulus to become most salient and start the saccade process over again.

Each saccade stores this information about the target in local space and helps the brain make sense of where it should look next.

All potential targets within the visual cone will have a steadily increasing salience so that hopefully our creature will be compelled to look at and examine each element of its surroundings.

First we have the VisibilityDaemon, this decides which objects within local space are valid saccade targets (we cant decide to look at the details something we cant actually see, first we need to bring it into view before we can decide where precisely to lay our eyes.) For example, we can be aware of an object behind us, as we remember seeing it there previously, and when we hear it make a noise, we can assume it was that object, but it's not until we can lay eyes on it that it actually becomes a target to look at and we can fixate on it precisely in space.

We have a FeatureDaemon which is called upon to tell the eyes where on a given object it should fixate. For example, buttons on a machine should be more enticing than the machine itself, just like a player or another creature's face should be a more likely target to fixate on than their feet. This daemon steadily adds salience to these kinds of significant features (these features are actually coded directly into the objects themselves and the daemon interprets them.)

Next is the SpatialDaemon, this one calculates the distance and location of visible objects, closer objects are more likely to be salient than distant ones, then it stores this info for other daemons to use. I think of this like depth perception, it's a kind of cheat for monocular vision.

Spatial awareness is followed by the KindDaemon which assigns salience based on the type of object. Plants and people tend to be more salient than furniture, utensils, devices and animals.

We have a MotionDaemon because moving objects should be more likely to grab our attention than stationary ones, and we have a SignalDaemon which increases the salience of certain objects in local space anytime they make a noise, a flash or otherwise broadcast sensory data like bumping into us.

The DeedDaemon is crucial to learning from others and learning the consequences of ones own actions. This daemon assigns a lot of salience to any object or person that is acting on another person or object in the world, it should allow for creatures to learn how to interact with new objects simply by watching another individual do it first. It is also activated when an individual does something themselves, essentially to alert them to the consequences of actions, be they good or bad.

The SeekDaemon is used to attach salience to objects which a creature is currently thinking about. if an object is similar enough to the top down signal coming from RECO, it will tend to be more salient than other objects. The more similar the object a creature has in mind is to the object in it's field of vision, the more likely it is to draw focus.

Last, we have the FinalDaemon which takes stock of all of the salience calculations made by the earlier daemons and any top down goals from elsewhere in the brain (bumps, noises, navigation waypoints). Ultimately, this daemon has the final say on where the eyes land and whether to fixate or saccade to a new target.


So now that we know why the eye/brain decides where to look, we should examine how it makes this happen on a physiological level.

What I am about to discuss is what Steve calls the Gaze Chain. This is an excellent model system for understanding the larger processes at work within a creature's brain. As you are likely aware, the brains of our creatures are very compartmentalized; each creature's mind is made up of around 100 different maps which can represent sensory data, a literal (well figurative technically) map of the environment, or other more abstract concepts. It's probably best to just to describe the maps within the Gaze Chain and their functions rather than generalize too much.

We have a system of three maps GAZA, GAZB, and GAZC, visual stimuli incoming from the eye organ enters through GAZA into retinoptic space which if you remember from our definitions can be represented as a 2d grid. this isn't the same 3x3 grid of local space, it maps 1:1 onto the relative location of objects in the visual field. the intrinsic goal of GAZA is to orient itself so that the salient visual stimulus is centered on the retina (the creatures don't actually have retinas, but it's a useful analogy.) if a salient object is offset from the retina, then GAZA sends a yang signal to the muscles which control eye movement and this essentially attempts to center the signal. If a salient signal is coming from a higher map or sensory organ such as ears or skin and it's too far out of range for a creature to swivel their eyes, this triggers a yang signal to GAZB which represents head space.

GAZB takes this bottom up signal and reads it as yin, this represents the senses telling the head "I'd really like to look over there but it's further than I can rotate my eyes, could you turn to face it please?" The eyes tend to get tired easily, if an object is salient enough to keep their attention, they will keep nagging GAZB with steadily increasing urgency to turn the head in order to face the stimulus so that the eyes can relax. In this way, the intrinsic goal of GAZA becomes the extrinsic goal of GAZB.

If GAZA and GAZB can't bring the object in front of the retina on their own, then GAZB sends a yang signal to GAZC which compels the body to turn and face our salient stimulus.  GAZC represents body space and is used by other maps to orient the creature towards salient signals so that the visual daemons can work their magic. GAZB also gets tired and nags GAZC to turn the body, our creatures don't like to have their necks craned to the side for long periods any more than you or I. This creates an automatic reflex which orients the eyes, the head, and the body to any sufficiently salient targets. 

So now we have seen how an object is translated first from a relative eye position, to a relative head position and finally to a relative body position. Once a object has been located in body space like this, it gets translated into absolute coordinates as represented by the local space grid. This information keeps getting translated and handed higher up the hierarchy into memory and executive processes in increasingly abstract ways.

The process can also work in reverse. A creature can consider where it last saw an object and send a top down signal to GAZC, translating the absolute (remembered) location in the world into a position relative to it's body. This signal gets passed down to GAZB and translated again into head space and ultimately through to GAZA and into retinoptic space providing the information needed to orient a creature's eyes toward the object it would like to attend to.

I've tried to make this all as clear as possible, but I'm so deep into my research that it's hard to remember what parts of this might be common knowledge and if I missed anything foundational that would be helpful to others. My journey will continue and I'll try to keep posting informative documents as my understanding evolves over time. If I've left anything out or anyone has questions, feel free to ask!

Obviously this represents two huge camps. I belong to the 'natural' crowd in that discovering and propogating certain genotypes via normal breeding cycles and forced 'studs and bitches'...while there is another camp that is excited to create and insert 'meta-creatures' via external modification/injection of genes. I know that this current strain of Steve's are much more complicated that prior iterations (possibly on purpose...don't ask me, ask Steve) but thoughts would be interesting from both camps.

That being said, I used the google coding assistant to write a little pyhton script to do just that!  For anyone interested, it can be found here.

https://github.com/FoggyGoofball/Jules-test/tree/feature/text-to-spreadsheet-parser

It could use some more work, but eventually I'll rewrite the whole thing in C#, once my kids are back in school.  Right now it's too hard to focus on coding with the constant chatter from little ones talking about memes and videogames.

That being said, I have compiled a list of all the chemicals presently in the biology along with a few notes.  Notes in bold are written by Steve and those which are underlined are from myself (@foggygoofball).  You may notice that most drive chemicals are also paired with what I'll call "precursor" chemicals which generally look like "****ase" and "****gen".  The chemicals in the list don't follow a particular pattern, I believe that they are ordered in the sequence which Steve implemented them (with the notable exception of "phantin" which is a very recent addition).

The actual chemistry is very similar to creatures, a chemical reaction can have up to two reactants and two products but may have one or none as well(in the case that a chemical is consumed and leaves no byproduct) Reaction rates can also be tuned in order to adjust the amount of time it takes  to react.

dioxide - CO2

oxygene - O2

hydroxy - H2O // (lost in sweat, etc. Gained by drinking, including 'drinking' raindrops)

hydrase - // (lost in sweat, etc. Gained by drinking, including 'drinking' raindrops)

hydrine - hydration, increases levels of hydroxy // (lost in sweat, etc. Gained by drinking, including 'drinking' raindrops)

fecanin - //

ureanin - //

fecoase - //

urinase - //

carboxy - // (in food)

polypep - // (in food)

triglyc - body fat // 0.5 is shown as normal sized, while smaller numbers make us look skinny and larger looks fat. See receptor to scale this appropriately.

glucose - blood sugar level

glucase - //

glycgen - increases glucose

gonease - potentially triggers things like lactation and motherly instincts //

maleate - // generic health indicator. Sets facial expression, skin coloration, etc. when we're sick. We slowly get better in realtime if undisturbed. Max sickness is fatal. As a drive it's unipolar - any increase is good and any decrease is bad. But as an intrinsic it's bipolar, so that we might express different things when we're feeling unusually healthy.

phantin - the chemical which allows for bollys to decide whether or not they'd like to be seen. At present 5 creatures are downloaded from the cloud each time you sign in and depending on how shy, trepidacious or resentful they each are, they may or may not allow themselves to be visible.
mortine - chemical for signalling mortal danger (drowning, starvation, dehydration, severe injury, etc), if it's concentration reaches a critical level, it will induce death

caldate - how warm or cool we feel // Subjective temperature, accounting for wind, etc. A concentration of 0.5 is what WE think is comfortable. So to make a creature that prefers warm conditions, modify the caldate EMITTER, so that a skin locus value of 0.5 produces a caldate concentration of less than 0.5 and feels cool to us.

apogate - // General sense of frustration. Most useful as an affect input to EXEC. Mouth actions cause frustration to rise when an action fails / times out, or it completes but we didn't receive a reply to the signal (e.g. we successfully try to bite something which doesn't have a response to that action). Raising frustration teaches us not to try doing this specific action to this object again. Potentially we can use this for other things, but it's essentially just a way to teach us not to do pointless or frequently disappointing actions

hedoate - pain vs pleasure drive

thymate - fight or flight

eudrate - //

dyniate - // rises as we rest (i.e. when decay outweighs production from muscle use) Note: if decay is too fast or muscle use too slow, we'll get LESS tired as we walk!

curiate - curiosity //

vigilin - wakefulness, also controls deep/REM sleep

monoate - crowded/lonely indicator

philate - // Dislike (or disgust) goes away quite quickly and hence merely avoiding the source is a good behavior. Desire is an age-specific desire for something or someone. The rules change over time, so it might be a need for Mom when young, or a friend later, but it could be chocolate or catnip! It's specifically intended to raise our interest in a specific object

thyogen - flight or fight, increase fight(precursor)

thymase - flight or fight, decrease fight(precursor)

eudigen - increase joy (precursor)

eudrase - decrease joy (precursor)

curigen - increase curiosity (precursor)

curiase - satisfy (decrease) curiosity (precursor)

monogen - increase need for companionship (loneliness precursor)

monoase - increase need to be alone (crowded precursor)

vigigen - raise alertness/wakefulness (precursor)

vignase - drowsy/decrease alertness (precursor)

dynigen - increase energy levels (hyperactivity? willingness to undergo strenuous activity) (precursor)

dyniase - decrease energy levels (lazyness precursor)

philgen - increase in desire (precursor)

philase - increase in disgust or derease in desire depending on context (precursor)

famiate - hunger

famigen - increase hunger (precursor)

famiase - decrease hunger (presursor)

sitiate - dryness/wetness // wet_dry is a measure of water balance, which is affected by sweating and drinking, but also by being out in the rain or going indoors. When it's raining, our gut actually INCREASES our water level, as if we're drinking the raindrops. So, if we're very dry then we can learn to stay outside, but as we remain outside we'll feel wetter and less thirsty, until we have an urge to go indoors.

sitigen - increase thirst (precursor)

sitiase - decrease thirst/ increase hydration (precursor)

hedogen - increase pleasure (precursor)

hedoase - decrease pleasure (precursor)

oratate - urge to speak, concentration rises steadily until a creature speaks and then quickly returns to zero. (this may not be in the finished simulation)

somatin - // somatin controls body size, puberty, etc. Spontaneously rises over REAL time. Reaching 1 DOESN'T necessarily mean we die, but represents the start of old age

andrgen - // Starts to rise at puberty and stays high (although it might sag a bit as we get old). Present in BOTH sexes, but has different effects in each.

luteine - // Enzyme that in females rapidly produces estrgen. In males it slowly produces testone instead.

lutease - // In females this enzyme suppresses ovulation throughout pregnancy.

estrgen - // Female hormone that is produced by luteine and consumed to make progest. Males don't produce it.

progest - // Female hormone that rises and falls in a cycle and controls fertility (and female sex drive)

gonadin - // Female hormone that rises throughout pregnancy and triggers birth

testone - // Male hormone that starts ramping up after puberty and the ramp gets reset every time we have sex. It's equivalent to the amount of sperm available and hence fertility.

prlctin - // reduces testone after sex.

This document will be relying heavily on my own personal understanding of how these A-Life simulations work.  Everything is from a layman’s perspective, I barely made it to being a college drop-out.  I am humbled to have been asked to share what knowledge I have gleaned and I will do my best to break things down in the simplest terms I can. 

Everything that I say can be assumed to be 40-80 percent accurate.  I have no formal training pertaining to this and began dissecting Steve’s life’s work for my own edification and nothing more.  I have been snooping through the code and source files for an hour or two a day going on about a week now whilst Steve has been putting in 14 hour days for more than a decade, so please excuse any inaccuracies.

Creatures:

Norns and Grendels were, and frankly, still are an incredibly impressive attempt to distill the essence of life into a knowable quantifiable system.  Given the computational constraints of the day (I ran it for the first time on 33 Mhz 486 pc with a massive 400MB hard drive) things in Albia were still very complex.  For me personally, the most accessible part of Creatures was the chemistry system.  Simple reactions within the creatures would give rise to different behaviors by affecting the strength of their individual drives. 

For example, starch converts into glucose which then is converted to energy which fuels the body.  Each and every chemical has a half life which determines the rate of decay or how long it tends to hang around in the body, this combined with the reaction rates between individual chemicals leads to a dynamic system which was carefully crafted to parallel actual biological systems.  There’s a ton of really thorough information on the creatures wiki.

https://creatures.wiki/Biochemistry for anyone interested in the details.

Along with the chemicals which might be familiar to us, there were also discreet chemicals which would indicate each drive or “desire”.  This includes such things as loneliness, hunger, sleepiness and sex drive.  I think of them as crude neurotransmitters, these chemicals would come together to determine what the particular creature was “thinking”. Norn brains were essentially evaluating the various drives and outputting simple scripts/actions like “when hungry, move towards food” but they are still incredibly interesting in their own right.  I remember reading about someone (probably Steve) explaining that the Norns fundamentally couldn’t think, they could react in seemingly intelligent ways but they don’t have an inner monologue or cartesian theater(if you haven’t read it yet, and even if you have, this https://phantasia.life/phantasian-biology-101-lesson-4-brain blog post is very enlightening.)  Again, plenty of people smarter than me have discussed this at length already as it pertains to C1, C2, and C3.   https://creatures.wiki/Brain

Another point that bears mentioning in terms of understanding the differences between the two systems (Creatures and Phantasia) is that in the 2d world, nothing had any substance.  Norns were only able to interact in very limited ways and nothing had physical properties, Norns could never find an object that was too heavy to lift for example and multiple objects could occupy the same space.

Phantasia:

The chemical system in Phantasia is pretty similar to that of Creatures, though it is still a work in progress.  For example, there’s really no need to start introducing toxins and medicines until the creatures themselves are finished.  One noteworthy exception is that drive chemicals are a bit more streamlined now.  Instead of separate channels for “crowded” and “loneliness” they are now combined into a single chemical which the brain interprets based on it’s concentration meaning that when the level in a bolly’s brain is low, they will be more likely to seek out company and when it’s high, they may prefer to take a walk by themselves to try and return the drive to a balanced state.  All of the drives operate like this, with a “baseline” which the brain will always try and bring them back to.  I like to think about it in the sense that the further from baseline each drive is, the less comfortable the creature is so it should try to respond accordingly.

In contrast to the Norns, Phantasians live in a fully simulated physical world.  The leap in complexity from a 2d system to 3d one is actually a requirement for the new generation of brains, they wouldn’t work as they are if they were transplanted into a 2d system.

The Phantasian’s brains are fascinating.  These creatures unlike Norns have actual physical bodies with around fourty to fifty individual components from ears and eyes to bones and skin, each of which have their own region of the brain or “lobe” assigned to them.  Sensorimotor organs associated with each body region feed data into their respective lobes given various environmental stimulus.

This is where it gets a bit murky.  Every lobe has multiple layers which in Steve’s terminology deal with “yin”(incoming, sensory inputs or present state) and “yang” (outgoing, what’s comfortable to us, the preferred state, or “baseline” I referred to my in drives example).

Essentially some witchcraft / black magic happens in the intermediary layers and the results become “yang” which is passed as “yin” to the next lobe in sequence. https://phantasia.life/docs/ep/biology/neuroscience/brain-maps/

There are approximately 100 of these lobes, constantly communicating with each other and this leads to all kinds of emergent behavior.  Phantasians have short term and long term memory, they have empathy towards their parents and offspring and are able to actually think about the world they live in in meaningful ways.

Like I said at the beginning, I’ve only been immersed for about a week, What I’m interested in within the simulation changes from day to day because the more I learn, the more I realize I didn’t understand.  Currently I’m thinking a lot about the visual classification system of objects and I intend to write up something on that in the next few days. 

I’ve learned a lot that I haven’t included here because I don’t want to be inaccurate and really don't know where to start, but I’ll do my best to answer any questions and research the answers I don’t have.