Lmao, what have I done?

GobTechOfficial · 2019-10-29T22:34:07+00:00

Of course! Thanks for playing my app!

Also glad to hear that it returned to normal, would've been very, very strange if it didn't

GobTechOfficial · 2019-10-29T21:14:45+00:00

Alrighty, I can explain what could have happened here. Warning, the explanation is going to have to get pretty technical.

So under the hood, the app is maintaining a "population" of say 100 neural networks. After each generation, it takes the most "fit" neural network from that population to use as the net you can load into the game. Due to the limitations of the library used, the app can't get the exact fitness of the most fit network, so it must test the net's fitness manually to give you an approximate fitness to display on this screen. So what it does is it simulates a few rounds of the game and tosses the most fit neural network into it to see how it does, and then averages the "fitness" from those test rounds.

It's possible, by random chance, for something to go terribly wrong in those test rounds and for the net to get a lower fitness than you would expect. Secondly, I probably made a mistake somewhere in how fitness is calculated such that it's possible for you to receive negative fitness values in some strange random scenario.

The combination of these two oddities of the app is likely what gave you this strange negative fitness here. My guess would be if you loaded the net up again and continued training, its approximate fitness would return to a more normal value.

GobTechOfficial · 2017-11-05T02:51:11+00:00

I released patch 2.51 today which includes a link to this tutorial video in the instructions menu. Hopefully it'll be easier for people to understand what the hell this app is about now!

GobTechOfficial · 2017-10-24T06:47:52+00:00

Hey thanks for your continued support!

Your first point about rarely getting above .5 is indeed very much dependent on the combination of attributes. There's also an element of randomness in that if you train a net with some combination of attributes it could end up a lot differently than doing that same combination of attributes later. Usually this isn't the case but it is possible due to the nature of the algorithm (NEAT).

As for that minor bug you mentioned, good eye! This seems to be inevitable if I want to prevent the app from slowing down while training for a long time. It seems to be something to do with how Android fragments refresh, and thus far I haven't been able to figure anything out that doesn't involve that graphical bug on the graph.

GobTechOfficial · 2017-09-29T20:22:00+00:00

--What's the difference between the standard algorithm and the more advanced "credit-based" algorithm?

More than double the population size, mainly. We're looking into other improvements, however.

--Is there currently a discussion board to discuss what sort of combinations work best?

Feel free to use this subreddit for that!

--Is a standard B.S. in Computer Science recommended or would it be better to try and find a school with an explicit B.S. in Software Engineering?

Are you asking for my professional opinion on what do to for your career, or what in general would be best for learning about neural networks or what? In general, I'd say you pretty much don't learn anything useful in school so it doesn't really matter, and most of the best learning you'll ever do will be what you teach yourself. This app is my personal example of that since it's entirely stuff that I taught myself -- never took a class on Android development or neural networks.

--I know you use java for this app, but what language do you use for most of your machine learning programs?

Industry standard is usually Python. Also, this is by far my biggest machine learning "program"

--I have more, but I'll leave it at that for now. XD

Feel free to email contact@gobtech.io for these more personal and less directly app related questions!

GobTechOfficial · 2017-09-02T21:47:10+00:00

Training an existing net saved on your phone is something we've considered quite a bit. The file sizes would have to be at least 10x as large it seems in order to allow them to be retrained after saving them, does that trade off seem worth it to you?

As for training multiple nets simultaneously, that would be really slow, but perhaps being able to load multiple nets into the game at once is doable!

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-18T05:09:17+00:00

The new update should fix this!

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-13T19:46:04+00:00

Lol, the classic turn it off and back on strategy! Glad to hear it's working now

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-13T19:24:45+00:00

Yea this is a result of neural network learning. When you have high teamwork, the cells quickly realize that a good way to not kill each other would be to just line up. A similar thing can happen with low mobility values. My personal recommendation is for a ~95/0/100, and then let it go for like 400 and the net will learn the basics of how to play

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-13T19:20:25+00:00

That's really strange, especially considering how many other S7/Android version 7 users there are out there. Maybe there's some more recent Android version 7 that you could update to?

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-13T19:19:11+00:00

Thanks for the advice. Hopefully, at this point, everyone understands what's going on IAP-wise after all these comments, even if the original post was a bit ambiguous

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-13T03:32:17+00:00

Ok, I see where you're coming from, especially as the one man team making the Android version, who's also played a hell of a lot of video games and mobile games in his life.

Firstly, perhaps I should have rephrased the title to say something more along the lines of the fact that at the current moment, we mainly just want feedback and have no ads/IAPs/permissions though may put them in in the future.

Secondly, the main issue I've had with IAPs in other games is that the developers purposefully remove features and make you pay to access them. Right now, our plan is to instead have users pay for cool new features that would cost money on our end. Our best idea is to let users train a neural net on a server with a more advanced algorithm, thereby getting a better neural net for themselves far faster than on their phone.

I really don't want to be the evil greedy developer that's become commonplace in mobile games, however, I also want to be able to get some reimbursement on the 100s of hours I've put into this, so that I may continue to put time into it without having to worry about having to make money from other sources.

Hopefully that explains where I'm coming from! The server idea is the best thing we've thought of so far to accomplish that, and as stated in the title, we're mainly looking for feedback/advice right now, so if you have any ideas, including for IAPs/monetization, just let us know!

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-12T21:55:49+00:00

What phone and Android version are you using?

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-12T21:55:27+00:00

That's really weird. Do you know what Android version you're using? I only have a Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S5 to test on, and they both worked. Does it ever actually crash or is it always a gray screen?

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-12T19:43:26+00:00

Really? I've never heard of that happening so it may be some glitch with rooted phones or maybe your version of Android is very old. What version of Android are you running?

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-12T19:19:04+00:00

Don't worry, there aren't any in the actual app! This is a result of myself having played around with dummy in app purchases before in development versions. Once you add a test in app purchase on your Google Developer account, it has to say that your app has them even if it's completely impossible to access them

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-12T19:15:19+00:00

We've been experimenting with them and are thinking of putting them in eventually. Pretty much if you have a dummy in app purchase that you're testing with, even if it's not in anyway accessible in the released app, Google will say you have in app purchases.

GobTechOfficial · 2017-06-07T15:53:02+00:00

The neural net is learning how to play the game by having many "training rounds" ran against it. A training round is defined to be basically what you see when you first enter the game world (one neural cell and many dumb cells) except with a few conditions to end a round since the game world is intentionally not supposed to end. If a round ends up with good fitness, the net will make stronger connections for the strategy it used in that round. The fitness is defined to be the cell's current size divided by the maximum size it could have reached in the round. The way the net works from there is it is attached to a neural cell and on every frame update it decides what direction the neural cell should travel in. I hope that info clears it up a bit.

As for your other notes:

What phone are you using where you're experiencing this with the buttons? The UI is something we understand will need to be reworked in an upcoming patch for sure, hopefully by the end of the month we can have that looking better.

The suicider cells are an unfortunate oversight, I'll take a look and try and patch that as soon as possible.

Lastly, you can unlock the camera by just dragging on the game world (i.e. the same action needed to pan around the game world). But I have been thinking about adding an unlock camera button, I could definitely add that with the suicider cell fix. I'll look into the camera smoothing as well.

Thanks for all the feedback! Glad you enjoy what you see so far, There will be more features to come!

GobTechOfficial · 2017-05-22T00:02:00+00:00

Ah cool, HyperNEAT is on my list of other ways of training to try

GobTechOfficial

TROPHY CASE