Fertility Infection

[bwisialo]

Description: A weak swimmer needs help to harness energy and use that energy to multiply to greater numbers. As it is, the swimmer is only capable of reaching 150. Can you create a virus that infects the swimmer with a Lipocyte and doubles the swimmer's population to 300?

Note: This challenge was moved from the "Beginner's Challenges" thread. It doesn't require a complex genome, but it requires learning (or knowing) how to use Lipocytes and Virocytes.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mjzi0u4taue3k ... trate?dl=0

Difficulty: Difficult

Objective: Make the swimmer population reach 300 cells.

Cells permitted: Virocytes and Lipocytes

Max cells inserted: 2

[Sakaaaaa]

Me: Come on man... use stuff you learned in Gene Therapy...

1 Thinking Session later:

I got nothing

[bwisialo]

The Virocyte component isn't a no-brainer, but that wouldn't be interesting. Actually, you do use the same principles as in Gene Therapy.

In Gene Therapy, you want to replace the swimmers' cells with yours, but you want to keep the Flagellocyte. Here, you want to keep the swimmer's Phagocyte and Flagellocyte: you can't use either of those in your genome. You only need to replace one cell in the swimmer's genome with one cell from your genome: you're performing a cell substitution.

You can avoid replacing cells here the same sort of way you do in Gene Therapy. A Virocyte replaces the mode "Copied from", its two child modes (1st generation), and the two child modes of both of those children (2nd generation). That's where copying stops. In Gene Therapy, you can copy over a second generation mode / cell that will produce the Flagellocyte without replacing the Flagellocyte.

Hint: Here, you want to copy over a mode / cell that will produce the Flagellocyte-Phagocyte pair without replacing them.

Hint, hint A Virocyte just follows the copying rules. It doesn't matter if the mode "Copied from" or its child modes are ever produced or used by your genome. So, select modes that put the cell / mode you want to copy in the 2nd generation of the copying sequence. And make sure it will split into the swimmer.

[Pds314]

One major issue with lipocytes is that, because they take so long to die, they can be abused. You don't necessarily need to even attach them to something to inflate cell population because cells can be programmed to spam them en masse and their lifetime is much longer than that of their progenitors. Consider the following:

Swimmer creates lipo sitting around doing nothing during egg laying process.

Swimmer grows up and lays an egg, creating another lipo.

lipos are just sitting there for months depleting their fat reserves and increasing the population counter.

[bwisialo]

Yeah, we had to remove Lipocytes from numerous in-app challenges during beta testing because the Lipocyte exploit could be abused in them.

With only Lipocytes and Virocytes available in "Fertility Infection," I believe it's not possible to engineer a Lipocyte exploit into your virus, In any case, it would be more difficult than the simple cell substitution solution.

[Alast]

And even if you infect the swimmer with Lipodropping you've still created a successful virus. I wouldn't see that as an issue here

[bwisialo]

Yeah, if a Lipo-dumping solution is more difficult than the desired solution, I wouldn't consider it a cheat or a problem. There might even be some challenges like that in the app.

Another reason Lipocytes got eliminated from some challenges was that, as initial cells, they can produce two, four, or more of the species your using to complete the challenge. This would mean, e.g., you could have used 10 Lipocytes to produce a start of 40 organism in Tip the Balance, and it would defeat the intent behind having one initial cell in "Tip the Balance II."

@Alast -I know you know all this. It's not for you

[Pds314]

Yeah, if a Lipo-dumping solution is more difficult than the desired solution, I wouldn't consider it a cheat or a problem. There might even be some challenges like that in the app.

My current best solution to Scarce Conditions might be a bit cheaty like this. It gets "pregnant" generating a bulbous lipocyte that eventually splits into a pair of twins that immediately become adults.

Fine and good, but the creature has nothing to prevent it from spamming a long string of pregnancies at once. This may in fact be desireable in some situations, and I've seen ones with two lipocytes chained on the back functioning perfectly.

However, if the first lipocyte then hatches, the result would be a pair of twins and a huge lipo just sitting around until it dies.

So one interesting way to modify this organism would be for it to stop creating twins, and instead upon giving birth to one offspring, also give birth to a lipocyte that splits down to 4-8 of them just sitting there. (Of course, there are also more useful things it could do)