Related papers: Moderate Environmental Variation Promotes the Evol…
Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies. While several basic theoretical mechanisms underlying its evolution have been established, research addressing more realistic settings remains underdeveloped. Drawing on the hypothesis that…
Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the obvious influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing improved environment…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
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…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing conducive environment layouts…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
We investigate two representation alternatives for the controllers of teams of cyber agents. We combine these controller representations with different evolutionary algorithms, one of which introduces a novel LLM-supported mutation…
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…
Range expansion and range shifts are crucial population responses to climate change. Genetic consequences are not well understood but are clearly coupled to ecological dynamics that, in turn, are driven by shifting climate conditions. We…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
Environmental variation can play an important role in ecological competition by influencing the relative advantage between competing species. Here, we consider such effects by extending a classical, competitive Moran model to incorporate an…
As automatic optimization techniques find their way into industrial applications, the behavior of many complex systems is determined by some form of planner picking the right actions to optimize a given objective function. In many cases,…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…