123 players submitted a total of 556 species. Most players submitted just 1 species. One player submitted 11. (I disqualified his[1] 11ᵗʰ submission.) 555 species qualified for entry. I expected more players would submit 10 species compared to 8 or 9 in order to max out their submissions but that didn't happen.
The most popular name was Krill, which three separate people submitted. This does not count Yellow Krill, Green Krill, Red Krill, Nano-krill, Fornicacious Krill, Orange-Krill and Orange Krill.
Other duplicate names included Armadillo, Bear, Desert Tortoise, Forest Tribble, Kraken, Trash Panda and Flesh-Eating Clam.
A couple species were placed in the Tundra/Desert without the necessary temperature adaptations. I modified them so they wouldn't instantly die. Other people gave cold/heat adaptations to water-breathing species, which are useless. I left those unaltered.
Speaking of useless adaptations, Weapons + Armor is only useful up to 10. If your Weapons + Armor exceeds 10 the extra armor is useless. 40 submissions (7%) had Weapons + Armor more than 10. I think the idea here was to create big exciting powerful monsters. This is the realm of Dragons, Forest Dragons, Basilisks, Sandworms, White-Whales, Tundrus Rex, Humans, All-eating Leviathans and the so-called "Ultimate Lifeform". I expect[2] none of them will survive to the end.
I tried to render a food web but it didn't work because there were 54,867 connections. I let graphviz run for ten hours before putting it out of its misery.
Stats
One sixth of the entries were venomous. One third had antivenom.
Unlike their number of entries, many players did choose to max out weapons, armor and speed.
Spawning Locations
It makes sense that the ocean is popular because of how much food it supports. I was surprised by how popular the human garbage dump was. The Desert and Tundra were the least popular, presumably due to the temperature hazards.
Foraging
The most common foraging adaptations were algae, seeds and carrion.
- Algae is on top because there is the most algae.
- Seeds were popular because they offers lots of nutrition compared to the digestive adaptation.
- Carrion it is most nutritionally dense option.
Forage or Hunt?
Half of all organisms were pure foragers. Of the rest, the majority had a foraging adaptation. Only a tiny minority were specialized hunters.
Social Media
I promised link to the winners' social media accounts (if they want). Most went with Twitter. Some went with LinkedIn, Tumblr, personal websites and Less Wrong itself. Two picked Instagram.
Feedback on the game so far:
Genome Format: Even though I'm a long time programmer, I vastly preferred this year's version where no one (except you) had to write any code. This was awesome!
Implementation/Spec: I would have preferred a clear spec accompanied by a reference implementation. Hy may be fun to use, but it's incredibly slow. (Also the version differences causing various problems was no fun at all.)
The only big thing to watch out for is to not use the built-in RNG of whatever language you'll end up using, but instead a relatively simple to implement (but still good quality) one like e.g. PCG where you can probably find a library, but if not then you have just a couple of lines to translate. (Different RNGs would mean different results. If everyone can use exactly the same, then all re-implementations are able to behave exactly the same, and it's easy to test that you got your implementation correct.)
Time: If you can, avoid the very last/first week of a quarter year - that's when companies and people who are self-employed have to finish all the bookkeeping. (I had several requests for clarification & planning the next quarter coming at me, that took away even more time...)
Duration: A week felt quite short, two weeks would have left a week to sort out infrastructure problems and then another one to solve the actual problem. Maybe next time you could split it in two, first week releases the spec and a sample environment (like the one that you used throughout the post), second week releases the actual parameters for the game. (I.e. the big 10-biome list and final feature costs.) Leaving a 48 hour window for changes (before submission opens) would be fine at that point; given that many would already understand the base setting, any quirks like grassland having less grass than rain forest would likely be noticed quickly and could still be fixed.)
Submission: Google forms sucked. Maybe there's a browser extension that makes it easier to use, but I had to click around a lot and for some reason the browser built-in form completion was disabled for the fields, so I had to manually paste email / user etc. every. single. time. Ugh. There was also no way to see which ones I had already submitted. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the one with 11 species (and even if, two would have been exact duplicates), but an alternative "or just send me a CSV file formatted like the example data" would have been much more usable for me.
Still, in all it was a lot of fun and I'm curious what the results will be. Thank you very much for running another round this year, and I hope there will be another one next year!
I love this forum/community so much.