telepathic-critterdrug is a fork of the excellent
ecology sim and artificial-life evolution lab Critterding which, if you haven't tried
it on its own, is a little bit faster than this.
Download telepathic-critterdrug for
Linux [feb 25: tried to fix this sticking problem when
rewinding the psychic tape. jan 16: reduced size of hill in testworld1.cpp, fixed
where bullet might not have been compiling anymore for some people]
Or, look, for
Windows! [may 29: critter_sightrange might be more of a speed factor in this. i mean in
windows. the latest windows version is svn-old-13, the only difference
between current is the steps in the hill world testworld are bigger -and-
the psychic tape might jam if rewound past the start, sometimes]
And hi sorry the 6600 generation foodotropes, in the flat world for the
Windows version and Linux users who want to see better mid to long ditance
food homing, came with no profile before, they would have done whatever in
almost any profile but I put it in march 2012 np flamoot
brilanon@gmail
Here's
a talk sort of about why I did this. Terence McKenna was one of my
biggest inspirations to add drugs to this sim lest it help foment
consciousness, art, religion and language, as he theorized. He talks about entities in virtual
spaces, that make machines that make machines, in that direction I just want
to say I'm considering an artifact manufacturing system for these animals so
that they can make little machines that will have neural nets but no head or
eye. The machines will not be able to make other machines. But it's a
step in that direction :)
I think our reality is probably a simulation. There are a lot of clues. I
also believe all neural nets are at least slightly conscious for some reason
that involves the class of problem a neural net comprises. I think
consciousness concresces around certain types of problems.
Find a sample species under the guide
Here's some other toys in case I die soon markov-attract-repel.py --
evolving text learner and mutator. really fun text-fuzz.py --
just fuzzes text without learning it, included in markov-attract-repel as
a function series.py -- a math toy.
makes series out of the sums of digits in other series. try it on powers of 2
and their results. real fun series-justsum.py -- ok so if you use like powers of 2 in base 10 in series.py
you get really alarming results like the 487 is a math chip on earth so
here's one with justsum set to 1, much faster so if you're working on like
series of numbers and some of them are very long this one only gets the
sums of digits, no subtractions, if you use those then it says 512 faster
but doesn't say 487 anyway i better go flamoot numerolit.py -- to break
up documents numerologically, requires perl and series.py, and isn't done
guide
See the file INSTALL for instructions. (Don't mind the warning about memory
leaks, it's outdated. You can still use the included gc lib if you want. Set CXXFLAGS
before running ./configure if so.) The resulting binary will be called
src/critterding... the home dir is still ~/.critterding. These should both
change to "drug" later on
Just start the thing, add some food ('+') and tune the settings in F6/F7
until a species takes hold. How long it takes for a species to appear,
terminating the random search at the start and beginning the
optimization/evolution phase, depends on your settings... 600 food is lots,
and hefty to simulate on most machines, so if it seems to take more than
that, consider using a smaller world
Hit F5 or click 'tv' to open the psychic screen. (F8 dismisses the HUD) On
here you can see critters which have psychic motors writing colours while
substrate behaviours the population votes on stripe, page, blur or ghost the
images. Hit T or Y a few times to see the different modes available. Between each pair
of modes is a paused one, you can use this to see better where your critters
are drawing. Hit U when you're done to give control of the grid back to the
population. This will also happen on a time-out, in case you forget
Still around? Notice you can mouse-over most objects for a little data on them. Left-clicking a critter opens its brain view and some controls. (Don't worry about the draw order issues in the critter's eyesight thumbnail in this window. It's not even a real thumbnail, it's somewhat larger than the real retinas you see in the lower-left. If you look at those, you'll see that clipping is done properly there, which is what the animals really see... still, sheesh, you worry a lot) Right-clicking one or any other object picks it up. The mousepicker doesn't work like in Black & White yet and you may pull things through the floor at certain angles but, trust me, it is definitely good enough. You can use the mousewheel to zoom.
To recycle the randoms faster, increase the costs in F7 or decrease the critter lifespan in F6. While we're there, get that autosaveinterval down from 86400 seconds (once a day) to something reasonable like 7200 (two hours)... I don't know how the default got way out there. Listen to me: if you click and hold on the Minus widget, then right-click, then release the left mouse button, it will stay held down and you can dismiss the window until the value runs down to something reasonable. This may take a couple of tries. Then just click it again to stop
Unless you set the evolve_set_to_grey flag in worldb.h to 0, and rebuild, there
are energy rewards available for brightening the bottom of the psychic canvas and
darkening the top. If your species seems to be powering itself this way
instead of using food, turn up the cost of firing motor neurons in
F7, and add food. You can also try raising max and procreation energy since
the rewards are constant and don't scale with those values. Finally I will
add a profile flag for this, soon, though it's integral to getting
them to care about the shared grid quickly...
The fine brain mutation settings in F7 (other than
number and rate) are only set on random
animals, then those original values are copied to their children, so if you change those while a species is already in there, hit 'k' a
few times to replace them. Or you can just edit their savefiles. This is
because those values are mutable but it is annoying until you get used to it.
However, body mutation settings in F6 are immutable (not per-critter) so you can tune those with
immediate effects.
Note that the mutation type distribution settings, which begin brain_ or body_percentmutateeffect should,
in either case, total 100. If one's total is over 100 effects can get skipped
altogether so have a calculator around when you rebalance these
I might release some scripts
later on to help use screenshots/the image viewer, etc. If you put 64x48
pnm's as ~/.critterding/screenshots/scrn.pnm and set show_scrn.pnm_every to
something higher than 0, you can display images on the shared grid. (The pnm's
have to be 18k, not 9k like some people seem to get from convert. It might depend
if your system is 32-bit or 64. I'm not sure. I'll support the other format soon
I hope!) Don't
worry about this for now
If graphic rendering doesn't seem to be the bottleneck, I'd turn up the
critter_sightrange to 300 or more. That should be enough to see all the way
across the default world, although most critters won't be looking at the
horizon until they're a bit evolved. Try increasing it and see if your fps stay the
same.
On the other hand if it's already slow, set killhalfat to something
reasonable -- 30 being 'risky' and 20 being 'very low'. If strain
populations aren't allowed to get to a stable size between kill-halfs, the
evolutionary process will slip, and you'll get increasing generation counts
without a rise in fitness. Running the largest population you can is
key.
I try never to hit kill half, and instead tweak the simulation so that the
population stabilizes under some decided limit. If you can configure the
energy values so that the amount of in-world food responds sharply to
population changes, then keeping the population within a range is easy,
but it will depend on the animals you get
Hit 'S' to save your profile for later. It will
be called 'default' and dropped in the present working directory. (In the Windows version it may go somewhere weird near "My Documents". What? Oh never mind, it is in the PWD after all. But watch out for this later) Load it
later by running the critterding binary with the argument --profile default. Look in
that file for settings not in F6/F7 but that are still important, like pill dose
and pill lifetime, autodrug, autoload, and a bunch of others.
A particularly
interesting one is anim_screen_every, which lets critters get a better
look at the psychic screen before it moves. They can vote in ways
that preserve the image even with this at 1 (the default), but it's not
common, and one day I realized that it
might take more than 1 frame for a colour to convert to a firing rate...
anim_screen_every can really be set to anything. If you change it, just choose something low
enough to be entertaining and high enough to be educational. Several
of these strange new settings will appear in a third option window, soon.
If you want to save and quit, but resume later, remember to copy your critters from the
most recent
save directory in ~/.critterding/save/profilename, and their movie from the movie/
subdirectory there, to ~/.critterding/load and ~/.critterding/load/movie
(the new-critters.pl script, bundled by accident, does this for you, if it
works [src/new-critters.pl profilename ... it will also attempt to
remove the latest save dir, in case it's empty, so be sure to specify
an argument])... setting autoload to 1 will bring in critters automatically,
autoload_movie does the same for the p-screen. Otherwise use PgUp to load
critters and "Load TV" on the HUD (F8) to import their movie. PgDwn and
auto-save always save both at once. Note that in Windows these directories are actually somewhere weird near "My Documents" (what?)
Now give it a few hours. Good luck and happy hacking. flamoot
Here's a tool in Python to show some
stats about your animals including graphing the sensors they use for sight
and motors they use for telepathy, iirc
foodotropes
Instead of waiting for your own species to evolve you can try my "foodotropes" which demonstrate response to eyesight and basic
socialization but don't use the psychic screen yet. Well they only have a
hundred neurons. Extract these in ~/.critterding/load. The profile is there
as well.
Just hit PgUp to bring them in. But not in the windows version, the steps
of the hill are still too high there. Maybe they will work though, still.
So OK Windows users, or anyone really, can still try these older foodotropes
instead which live in a flat world and use sight another way, over longer
ranges, which is still cool
caveats in this release
F1 help window now shows the right keys
With autocam on, animals might not be pickable/tooltippable at certain
zooms. Just spin the mousewheel in this case. I think this only happens in
testworld (hill world).
In race mode, autocam will snap to an animal, but not follow it. This is
expected but I still may fix it. It doesn't seem real important. Having autocam
follow the winning critter in race might be a good idea still
mutate_mutateEffects was borked before. It's now repaired and available to
you and your critters, so give it a try if the brain mutation type
distribution you've set doesn't have some special meaning. Note that
flipping it on in F7 won't set it to true for critters already in-world
(just new ones after that)... you'll have to set it to 1 in your .cr files
by hand if you have a species you want to try it with.
The bias to survival-related sensors/motors, over psychic ones, has been
lowered to ten percent. If you sense this is too low (and don't mind
critters with hundreds of connections to each tactile, age, and energy
input) you can raise it by
opening src/brainz/brainz.cpp and changing lines 443, 508, and 778 so that
where it says get(1,10) > 1 it says get(1,10) > n (where n is 1 to 9, unless
you prefer a bias of 0% or 100%!) ... remember to rebuild afterwards. You can
also try even lower biases if you want to focus on telepaths/infovores. Just
raise the value of 10. I should have a profile setting for this soon. The
bias compensates for the fact that there are thousands of times more retinal and psychic inputs than
there are of other, more important inputs that have to be hooked up at least
one time. The same applies to motors. So this just chooses one of a
pre-selected set of survival-related IO's, over the usual random one...
Configurables in src/scenes/entities/worldb.h start at evolve_set_to_grey =
true. Set this to false if you want to prevent them gaining energy from any kind of
telepathy, otherwise they can earn a little for brightening the bottom of the
canvas, and darkening the top (for fire mode). This might be extended to
reward them for implementing the rules of some CA, like Conway's Life,
eventually. You can also change the max pop here. These values should be 'false' and 'very high', respectively, in a
release, but I forgot to reset them from the values I was using when I
released the last snapshot. A good invitation to start hacking it yourself
I guess.
Particle settings are also in worldb.h including particles per bite
(density, halved for cannibalism since it takes so long) and max particles
A fully fed critter may spawn a ton of particles trying to finish a piece of
food
Thanks for reading the caveats :3
bugs
Current version may have a super rare segfault, when you hit 'z' to move the
autocam to a previous animal. And maybe when you hit 'q'. It is in
worldb.cpp's goto_critter() and I should have a fix pushed soon. (I actually think
one of my kludgy workarounds to this has got it squashed)
There are two physics bugs I still have to squash. None are crucial, all are annoying
If a body mutation results in an overlong or otherwise pathological
constraint (resulting in a very long, stretchy animal), I'd appreciate a copy of
the critter in question. I'm trying to zero in on this at the moment, specifically
which operation is responsible. It doesn't seriously
impact evolution (the offspring is just unfit and will probably never breed)
but at 100% body mutations, it shows up pretty often.
Some critters seem to transfer momentum at times for no reason. This may be
visible in a population of randoms if you grab and release one repeatedly
near some others. It is probably less noticeable with self_collisions
off. Whether it's limited to mousepicker events such as this or
not, I will discover in time >_<
The critter retina thumbnail in the brain view box is wrong but informative.
Visual/psychic cortex renderings in same are incomplete but entertaining
differences from critterding This section is old. If you take it on faith prepare to be surprised instead
We've made the following changes to the superb parent application...
To substrate: critters gain a 64x48 shared retina, animated through
time as 1024 frames play forward than in reverse. They can make writes to
this retina that will affect all the other critters and so use it for
communication, art, or war. The screen scrolls over time to help teach them
its dimensionality. F5 brings it up. This used to bring up the population
graph, you'll have to use the HUD (F8) to do that now. The graph also now
charts neurons and synapses but doesn't work quite as well. Hit T to
pause/unpause the psychic screen/racial movie and view a still frame as
changes are made to it, but this will probably mess up critters who are
accustomed to it softly scintillating, or whatever, so do unpause after
To environment: we added a selection of psychoactive tablets. The new
profile parameters are pill_energylevel (dose), pill_maxlifetime, pill_maxtrip
(max allowed onboard dose of each drug), and pill_size. These serve as agonists
and antagonists for the two main types of neuron, and a fifth drug acts as a
potentiator.
To critters' brains: motors to blink were added, for both the main
retina and the communal hallucination screen. Three motors to select in
binary a write intensity were also added as well as hundreds of inputs and
outputs for reading and writing the screen itself. "Touching pill" input was
added. Some other stuff
64-bit fix
although critterdrug should build normally on 64-bit, if you get a link time error, try the following before running ./configure
export LDFLAGS='-L/usr/lib64'
freetype fix
If you get build errors associated with ftgl, try the following
./configure CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/freetype2"
or if all else fails
cd /usr/include
ln -s freetype2/freetype .
No this won't wreck your system. You are probably in Ubuntu
That's telepathy
slashdot
From Slashdot and some prior drive on Jan 10th I've emitted about 3000
copies so I sure hope they're working right. You can still mail the address
at the end with questions, I'm not really getting any now. Or try
irc.freenode.net #critterding
changelog
jan 16 2012:
* hill world flattened somewhat (set testworld to 1 to use)
* bullet compile bug worked around
mar 10 2011:
* fixed critter psychic vision to be locked to striping window not frame
edges though morphics are still aligned to frame boundaries which makes
sense in this model sort of
* fixed other things
+ critters have a pen their offset motors can move around the screen
+ autocam debug output
dec 22 2010:
+ body_selfcollisions flag ported from critterding, just set it to 1 if it
keeps a species you enjoy from working properly
* default settings re tuned
* p-screen fire effect no longer bleeds at frame boundaries
! three releases this week. wow
dec 21 2010:
+ follow cam added (hit 'A') for those of you with animals that might squirm
out from under the microscope...
* mutate_mutateEffects fixed
* non-psychic sensor/motor biases to lowered to 10%
* body and brain mutation type percentages now total 100 by default
dec 17 2010:
+ particle system added for bites, particles are edible/pickable
* race/testworld fixed, now you can evolve for distance moved or with
hills
* some speedups
* many small bugfixes incl to blinking and touching
* help window shows right keys
* biases added to the GA in september
may 24 2010:
+ ability to show images using 64x48 .PNM files. recommend using a
ramdisk for ~/.critterding/screenshots directory. look for
show_scrn.pnm_every in profile (hit 's' to write one). showing critters
screenshots of their world will let them match the colours between the
psychic and regular retinas.
+ too many to list (also broke savefile compatibility that time sorry)
* dendrite values were being destroyed
* critters informed when a head touches them
feb 25 2010:
+ huge drug effect fix (only worked with my CXXFLAGS .-. )
- at some point i borked the morphic fields (might have just been my flags
suppressing the real behaviour)... if you see the whole damn thing turn
white and their neuron potentials bottom out, wait a week for a patch
feb 20 2010:
+ psychic substrate behaviour is electable
+ fire, scroll, disperse and collect effects added to substrate
+ keys to drug the whole population: hjnm, and undrug, dfcvb.
Fullscreen was moved to g, colourmode moved to x, and
mouselook moved to / (careful!)
+ autodrug added to help get populations started, with autodecrementable
doses
+ randoms have eat/breed wired 100% of the time
+ lock out voting temporarily and change psychic substrate behaviour
manually with t and y keys, hit u to allow voting again
* another leak squashed
- still have to fix the graph
- possibly gained a memory corruption bug -- i hit it after ~12 hours but
changed a few things afterwards too. could have just been my RAM burning up.
mwa haha. if you get a crash email brilanon@gmail.com ty
jan 24 2010:
* fixed a buffer overrun at the end of brainz' public section. probably
nothing to worry about... probably
+ enhanced critterview with buttons to add drugs, add food, blink the eye,
blink the psychic field, and lock in drug levels, also dual visual
cortex views for retina and group screen. w00p
jan 22 2010:
+ added a switch and profile option 'condensed_colourmotors' that uses six
colour operation selection motors to divide the number of motors required
to write the entire psychic screen by 6. this gives each critter write
access to 6x more of the screen than its neuron count would normally allow
(for telepathy not morphogenics) but they have to choose one colour
operation for every cell per frame. critters need rewiring to be loaded from
a sim condensed colour motors to one without or vice-versa, i use python for
that
jan 14 2010:
+ added morphogenic fields using top of shared screen -- tiny
automatic changes to colours based on brain activity, and tinier changes to
brain activity based on colours.
* drug activity changed from additive to
multiply -- morphogenic now additive, drugs will enhance its activity. This
way creatures that have eliminated synapses into the grid can still be
psychic on psychedelics. flamoot
todo...
- un-foul-up the pop graph
- key to clear a frame
- Option to clear the movie w/ confirm [since added import movie but still]
- Only allow writes to movie by selected critter, key toggle
- Multiple motors per neuron
- Profile settings for movie length, world frames per movie frame, movie size
- switch for morphogenic field
- drugs aren't recycled for falling off the world yet. if you want to get
rid of some, just feed them to one
- a switch for energy level's effect on neuron potential
- bodiless mode for pure OCR/image comprehension evolution
old versions
- svn-old-1 pre-morphogenic fields
- svn-old-2 w/o condensed motors mode
- svn-old-3 before visual cortex views
(this version and older ones have memory leaks (increase the size of tripping[] to 5 in brainz.h)
- svn-old-4 before voting and extra screen modes(also haz leaks)
- svn-old-5 before drug effect fix(may not have leaks)
- svn-old-6 some NAN's about
- svn-old-7 no biases, drug effects on graph, other stuff
- svn-old-8 before particles, race/testworld fix
- svn-old-9 before autocam was added and mutateEffects fixed
- svn-old-10 before body_selfcollisions flag (now off by default)
- svn-old-11 p-screen fire effect would bleed at frame borders
- svn-old-12 critter minds eye didnt follow striping effect, like morphics dont on purpose
- svn-old-13 testworld1.cpp used huge steps and bullet might have stopped compiling on some systems
- svn-old-14
sometimes the psychic tape jammed at the start when being wound in reverse.
should be fixed now, but maybe not
extensions and commentary -- evolving the rest of the eye (or, "the problem with vision")
The psychic screen where the critters can colour is one of the big changes from
Critter Ding but here's an important caveat: as far as they're concerned, there
are seven primary colours in the world (between the main eye and psychic eye), not three! (Note! They may actually think there are hundreds of
colour channels at first! I just figured this out. There are weird stopgaps, covered in the last paragraph as well as spottily herein, that might shorten the definition of 'evolutionary time' in this context but,
read on! [Actually the main eye or retina receives four channels -- food fluoresces in Alpha or UV strongly, drugs
slightly. Critter's body colours never include UV. Tripview only shows RGB, not UV, for
a total of seven... arg...]) Would that I could represent the colour channels on the psychic screen (tripview or TV on the hud) as other than
red, green, and blue, to the user, for this reason. This is definitely not clear,
so read on: the colours have no real wavelengths in their world. Their brains might
signal combinations of red, green and blue as certain potential changes
at different points internally, but when they imagine a scene (a process we have no
insight into at this point), it may be with seven different colour channels, not
the main four, three of which appear on the tripview. They have no reason or way to
know that what we see as red on the tripview is the same colour (to us) as the red
pills or red heads in their physical world. As far as we're concerned the three colour
channels on the tripview are some totally abstract, other thing to them.
This means you should never expect that a green psychic screen will remind them of
food, for instance, even with evolved species! I'm considering a few "fixes" to this. Going to eight-bit
colour for the whole application, then using a single sensor to signal every colour,
possibly using potentials up to 64 with gradations of 1/4 to fit in all 256 colours, is
one option, but the tripview would become much less brilliant if we moved away from 24-bit
colour. Using a constant ROYGBIV palette where a colour on the tripview signals the same
potential as one on the retina, though, would simulate wavelengths for them (or at least
represent wavelengths!). Maybe just adding one to the potentials the green sensors
signal with, and two to the potentials the blue sensors signal, would be a good alternative.
This is actually the whole reason I made a blue psychic screen/tripview more calming to them,
and a red one more exciting to them, and green a combination of the two, morphically (not
telepathically, morphically! There are two things that happen on the tripview -- morphic fields
at the top, cybernetic telepathy on the rest)... blue drugs modulate inhibitory neurons, red
ones, excitatory, and food is represented by two colours, green and UV... arg.
OK. I've given it more thought and here's the final word on the colour-channels issue (for now). Dawkins pointed out that
the mammal eye is a really exquisite device. We thought we were giving these animals -- even the random ones --
an eye, when we gave them each a camera to view the world with... really, we were only giving them an image. Maybe
we've packetized the rods and cones (strictly speaking, they only have cones) in a fashion inspired by the mammal eye,
but we don't even provide a default visual cortex for the evolutionary process to graft the brain to. In other words,
we didn't cheat nature (yet): it's up to the evolution game to provide all the wiring behind the physical retina.
The neural handiwork that assembles an image in the mind, from the image that's focused on the retina, is a matter of
evolutionary time first and good breeding later. Imagine that, besides having mostly normal vision, there was a spot in
your eyesight where you wrongly perceived the colour green as the colour blue. It wouldn't even be your fault. That's
pretty much what we're dealing with.
I'm not saying they have to evolve the physical, mammal eye that Dawkins pointed out was pretty hugely unlikely to happen
on its own, or even arrive from a series of improvements to a rudimentary implementation, that rudimentary implementation
being unlikely to confer a great survival advantage on its own. No... we've provided the lens, cornea, fovea (whatever that
is), and retina. It's everything behind the retina that they'll have to evolve...
I've noticed that early on the critters tend to respond to eyesight almost like a sense of smell. They wave their head polling
their surroundings for activation of isolated sensors to see if the objects responsible are large to them (nearby) or small and
fleeting (far away). At this stage, they are not even assembling an image (of which I was crudely aware, already). But interestingly
they might see each and every visual pixel as a totally different colour depending not just on colour channel but on position...
at first!
What does evolutionary time imply in this case? Honestly I'm no longer sure. Sorry this section has run on so long. I just wanted to draw attention
to the problem. It's up to the animals, through evolution, to assemble the neural wiring that will make the orderly, mammal-inspired camera
and retina we provide act like even a compound eye. Giving them a default cortex like in my neural cellular sim
wouldn't be a solution. Basically you'd be facing the exact same problem. Unless you settled for starting with very-much-less-than-random
animals... which in Critter*, we don't... is an adam-distance (generation count) of 1,000 enough to assemble an image like vertebrates
do? Maybe ever. Is 10,000? It's a lottery. 100,000? Then, I think, you might be pushing past insect sight... realistically you will not
get to an adam distance of 100,000, however, so I'd set mutation rates high (keep the number of mutations high enough to establish a
gradient, or they'll slip -- the number of mutations should also be a percentage of their size, not an absolute number, so that they don't
bloat just to make mutation more inoccuous and get more healthy offspring in the face of it... I'll get this in, but for now, just tend the
thing once every few days, nudging number of mutations upwards if you see this happening) and... yes... hope! All of this is still a
lot of fun. I promise
Still on the subject of matching up the colour channels that recur between their eyesight and their
telepathic canvas... there are things you can try, in the meantime: like taking screenshots of the app running, converting them to 64x48 pnm's (imagemagick's 'convert'
being a great way, though I'll repeat the warning from the guide: "The pnm's
have to be 18k, not 9k like some people seem to get from convert. It might depend
if your system is 32-bit or 64. I'm not sure. I'll support the other format soon
I hope!") and putting them in the 'screenshots' directory as scrn.pnm with "show_scrn.pnm_every"
set to something in your profile, is one idea. If you had a dedicated box for the app and could
leave it foregrounded over evolutionary time for this purpose (or a way of taking snaps from the
app even when it's in the background... one should really be built in, since this is so interesting)
then they (the critters) could evolve to recognize the colours on the tripview are showing the same images they see
on their retina, using three of the four colours it uses, and match them. Showing the tripview as a
texture on an in-world object would have the same effect and would let you minimize the app... also
an interesting idea I might go ahead and put in still, likely by default in that event. A really tantalizing
notion, that one. This should appear under 'caveats' but I think it's important enough to cover in the
guide (this being added June 2011 and hopefully to be removed if I ever come up with a good way to give the
colours unique wavelengths. Oh look it has its own section at the end now hah). Actually adding up the intensities of each colour channel to generate a position
on a ROYGBIV palette which is not 8-bit, and convert it to a potential for each colour, fixed between
psychic and retinal sensors, would add number-crunching but would achieve this without a drop in the number
of available colours, while still reducing the number of sensors needed to cover retina and tripview to a third...
only time will tell what I do about this, ultimately, but it's good to at least understand for now
