Related papers: Computability, G\"odel's Incompleteness Theorem, a…
Diversity is an important factor in evolutionary algorithms to prevent premature convergence towards a single local optimum. In order to maintain diversity throughout the process of evolution, various means exist in literature. We analyze…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
By nature, transmissible human knowledge is enumerable: every sentence, movie, audio record can be encoded in a sufficiently long string of 0's and 1's. The works of G\"odel, Turing and others showed that there are inherent limits and…
Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this suggests an approach driven by evolutionary metaphor. On the…
Generalised Probabilistic Theories (GPTs) provide a unifying framework encompassing classical theories, quantum theories, as well as hypothetical alternatives. We investigate the problem of extending a system with a finite set of…
Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…
Evolutionary multitasking has recently emerged as a novel paradigm that enables the similarities and/or latent complementarities (if present) between distinct optimization tasks to be exploited in an autonomous manner simply by solving them…
The existence of complex (multiple-step) genetic adaptations that are "irreducible" (i.e., all partial combinations are less fit than the original genotype) is one of the longest standing problems in evolutionary biology. In standard…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
We propose that genetic encoding of self-assembling components greatly enhances the evolution of complex systems and provides an efficient platform for inductive generalization, i.e. the inductive derivation of a solution to a problem with…
Partiality is a natural phenomenon in computability that we cannot get around. So, the question is whether we can give the areas where partiality occurs, that is, where non-termination happens, more structure. In this paper we consider…
Over the past 30 years many researchers in the field of evolutionary computation have put a lot of effort to introduce various approaches for solving hard problems. Most of these problems have been inspired by major industries so that…
Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state…
A key question in biological systems is whether genetic diversity persists in the long run under evolutionary competition or whether a single dominant genotype emerges. Classic work by Kalmus in 1945 has established that even in simple…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
We address a primary question of computational as well as biological research on evolution: How can an exploration strategy adapt in such a way as to exploit the information gained about the problem at hand? We first introduce an integrated…
Sequential hypothesis testing asks for decision rules that update as data arrive. A natural goal is \emph{eventual correctness}: the rule may change its mind early on, but it should make only finitely many wrong decisions almost surely.…
There are several forms of irreducibility in computing systems, ranging from undecidability to intractability to nonlinearity. This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of investigating speed-up…