Related papers: How morphological development can guide evolution

Background. Organisms use a variety of mechanisms to protect themselves against perturbations. For example, repair mechanisms fix damage, feedback loops keep homeostatic systems at their setpoints, and biochemical filters distinguish signal…

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…

Machine intelligence can develop either directly from experience or by inheriting experience through evolution. The bulk of current research efforts focus on algorithms which learn directly from experience. I argue that the alternative,…

The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance…

We present a simple game which mimics the complex dynamics found in most natural and social systems. Intelligent players modify their strategies periodically, depending on their performances. We propose that the agents use hybridized…

The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…

While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…

A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…

Evolutionary game dynamics describes not only frequency dependent genetical evolution, but also cultural evolution in humans. In this context, successful strategies spread by imitation. It has been shown that the details of strategy update…

Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…

Recent advances in LLM agents enable systems that autonomously refine workflows, accumulate reusable skills, self-train their underlying models, and maintain persistent memory. However, we show that such self-evolution is often…

Programming languages are engineered languages that allow to instruct a machine and share algorithmic information; they have a great influence on the society since they underlie almost every information technology artefact, and they are at…

Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…

Embodied agents can benefit from skills that guide object search, action execution, and state changes across diverse environments. Since embodied environments vary across layouts, object states, and other execution factors, these skills…

Understanding systems level behaviour of many interacting agents is challenging in various ways, here we'll focus on the how the interaction between components can lead to hierarchical structures with different types of dynamics, or…

Evolutionary change over time in the context of data pipelines is certain, especially with regard to the structure and semantics of data as well as to the pipeline operators. Dealing with these changes, i.e. providing long-term maintenance,…

The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…

Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…