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.
If there's two weeks, that should leave enough time for making & checking alternate implementations, as well as clarifying any unclear parts. (I never fully understood the details of the selection algorithm (and it seems there were bugs in it until quite late), but given a week for focusing just on that, I hope that should work out alright.)
No complaints here, that's the only sane approach for research and other software like this.
Compared to e.g. trying to get the Mersenne Twister (which I think is still Python's default RNG?) either linked to or re-implemented in some other obscure language, that's a trivial task. I don't expect problems there, as long as those functions actually use the specified RNG and not internally refer to the language's default.
Oh also, on genome formats: I've been doing quite a bit of stuff with domain specific languages / PLT stuff, as well as genetic algorithms and other swarm optimization approaches before. If you have any ideas that you want to bounce off someone or have some cool idea for some complex genome format that looks like it might be too much work, feel free to ping me - I might be able to help! (Ideally in a sufficiently abstract / altered way that I can still participate, but if need be, I'd give that up for a year too.)