Understanding the mining example

My friend Samuel (@Samuel__GP) suggested me -in a comment- to try to explain how simple the idea used is compared with the rich an efficient behaviours it produces on the rocket, and it is not easy, but I will try...

So first have a look at this video:

The goal of the player is to pick up rocks with it's hook and then take them to the deploy area (the small circle filled with a grid). Once the rock is there, the hook releases and you can not trap the rock again until it leaves the big circle. In that moment, the rocket will try to catch it again and so on.

Emotional links

Adaptive foraging, or the ability to harvest and collect items, is the main test-bed for swarm intelligences, as it resemble real life problems and mimic interesting social behaviours like ants and bees swarms.

So I am adapting my fractal AI code to deal with this problem, and as a first result, here I show you a video with only one agent (quite a small swarm!) so I can test if the new gadgets works OK.

The rocket now have a hook that will trap asteroids as a magnet. The hook is connected to the rocket with a rubber band, making the rocket-hook structure quite difficult to manage.

Passing the "Asteroids Test"

Fractal AI is quite mature by now, it has reached a quite big milestone, being the first "finished" fractal AI I have been able to produce to date. It is not still "completed" in a general sense, but with some prefixed limitations, it is finished.


I stresssed it with 30 asteroids using only 100 futures (in previous tests I needed 300 or 500 futures to get something like this) and it was no problem for the rocket at all. Then I tried 40 asteroids. Again no problem but more stress.

50 was too much for it. The sky was full of asteroids, I didn't spect it to survive at first, but it did. I did manage to fly away the shower, but survivided! It is a new record.