Related papers: Evolutionary Predictability and Complications with…
This paper concerns applications of genetic algorithms and genetic programming to tasks for which it is difficult to find a representation that does not map to a highly complex and discontinuous fitness landscape. In such cases the standard…
It has been hypothesized that one of the main reasons evolution has been able to produce such impressive adaptations is because it has improved its own ability to evolve -- "the evolution of evolvability". Rupert Riedl, for example, an…
Crossover and mutation are the two main operators that lead to new solutions in evolutionary approaches. In this article, a new method of performing the crossover phase is presented. The problem of choice is evolutionary decision tree…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…
The evolution of preferences that account for other agents' fitness, or other-regarding preferences, has been modeled with the "indirect approach" to evolutionary game theory. Under the indirect evolutionary approach, agents make decisions…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
Epistatic interactions between mutations add substantial complexity to adaptive landscapes, and are often thought of as detrimental to our ability to predict evolution. Yet, patterns of global epistasis, in which the fitness effect of a…
Although the fundamental probabilistic theory of extremes has been well developed, there are many practical considerations that must be addressed in application. The contribution of this thesis is four-fold. The first concerns the choice of…
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…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
A key challenge to make effective use of evolutionary algorithms is to choose appropriate settings for their parameters. However, the appropriate parameter setting generally depends on the structure of the optimisation problem, which is…
Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…
Growing efforts to measure fitness landscapes in molecular and microbial systems are premised on a tight relationship between landscape topography and evolutionary trajectories. This relationship, however, is far from being straightforward:…