Back to the brain we go.

I already had snails eating food in jars before, but it was kind of a hack. Each snail would just eat a bite of whatever consumable item was in the jar. When I stupidly decided to try to make a simple snail brain, I knew I’d have to make things like eating fit into it. Today I made a very rough version of something like that.

Each snail has a number of motor neurons in its brain. Out of all the motor neurons, there is one for biting and one for swallowing. So far I am bypassing the swallowing completely and just firing the bite neuron and having the snail bite food and swallow it at the same time. Basically…here’s how it works. This is kind of a brain dump so may not actually make any sense.

Items and snails are now given some properties: luminance , temperature , hardness , roughness . There may be others down the line, but for now that’s it.

I’m also setting some general pain thresholds for the snails (so far all the snails have the same thresholds), as well as totally random default properties (as per above):

public $luminance = 25; public $temperature = 20; public $roughness = 5; public $hardness = 15; public $luminancePainThreshold = 100; public $temperaturePainThreshold = 50;

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Items are a little more tailored - their individual luminance, temp, etc properties can be set by item template in the db (though right now I’m just using some default values there too).

So basically if a snail sees something with a luminance that’s too high it will not be having such a good time.

Oh, and snails now have a currentMood property. In the memory tables (which are already created but not yet in use) there is a consequenceRating property, which reflects an action’s impact on the snail’s currentMood .

So the main thing you need to bite an item is to actually be close enough to it to touch it. I made a small change to checkSensor() to allow for a maxDistance to be passed:

public function checkSensor($sensorQual, $maxDistance = 999999) { // ...blah blah blah

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Also, we set luminance, temp, roughness, and hardness to null by default in the array of detected objects and then specify which attributes to grab for each sensor (because we don’t care about roughness if the snail isn’t touching the thing, for example).

$toPush = [ 'id' => $object->$idString, 'idString' => $idString, 'inputWeight' => $inputWeight, 'distance' => $distance, 'luminance' => null, 'temperature' => null, 'roughness' => null, 'hardness' => null ];

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So our TactileSensor ends up looking like this:

class TactileSensor extends Neuron { public function checkForInput() { $maxDistance = 5; $detectedArr = $this->checkSensor($this->snail->currentTactileReceptorQual, $maxDistance); foreach ($detectedArr as &$detectedObject) { // $controller = null; if ($detectedObject['idString'] === 'snailID') { // $controller = $this->snailController; $object = $this->snailController->findSnail($detectedObject['id']); } else if ($detectedObject['idString'] === 'itemID') { // $controller = $this->itemController; $object = $this->itemController->findItem($detectedObject['id']); } $detectedObject['hardness'] = $object->hardness; $detectedObject['temperature'] = $object->temperature; $detectedObject['roughness'] = $object->roughness; } $this->detectedArr = $detectedArr; } }

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Another change is in setWeights() . Whereas before we’d just add something like 0.05 to the inputWeight if an object had been detected by more than one sensor, now we actually add all the inputs together. If a specific sensor had a maxDistance specified we give it a higher inputWeight by default (2 instead of 1) because it had a tougher criteria to meet (not sure I’ll keep this, since the closest object already gets a boost anyway down the line).

Anyway, then in the decision neuron we decide what to do…right now none of the memory stuff is implemented, so we go straight to a random “curious or not” check:

public function checkDecision($object, $memories = null) { Log::info('checkDecision object: ' , $object); if (count($memories) === 0) { $rand = Utility::RandomInteger(0,1); if ($rand === 1) { // Curious. Approach if far away if ($object['distance'] >= 5) { Log::info('approaching object1: ' . $object['id'] . ' distance: ' . $object['distance']); $this->approachObject($object); } else { Log::info('TOUCHING. TRY TO BITE ' . $object['id']); $this->biteObject($object); } } else { // Indifferent. Ignore; } } }

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approachObject() and biteObject() then fire the biting and moveleft/moveright/moveup/movedown motor neurons.

As you can see it’s still not really that decision-makey. Snails will eventually have other criteria involved in whether they try to bite something or not (that is, they won’t necessarily try to bite an object just because they’re touching it).

That’s it for now…at least they’re eating again.