Related papers: Modularity in biological evolution and evolutionar…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
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…
Recently, computational modelling became a very important research tool that enables us to study problems that for decades evaded scientific analysis. Evolutionary systems are certainly examples of such problems: they are composed of many…
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…
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…
In this position paper (1) we discuss two particular aspects of Systems of Systems, i.e., variability and evolution. (2) We argue that concepts from Product Line Engineering and Software Evolution are relevant to Systems of Systems…
Ecological systems can be seen as networks of interactions between individual, species, or habitat patches. A key feature of many ecological networks is their organization into modules, which are subsets of elements that are more connected…
Analyzing the computational complexity of evolutionary algorithms for binary search spaces has significantly increased their theoretical understanding. With this paper, we start the computational complexity analysis of genetic programming.…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…
One of the roots of evolutionary computation was the idea of Turing about unorganized machines. The goal of this work is the development of foundations for evolutionary computations, connecting Turing's ideas and the contemporary state of…
A common trait of complex systems is that they can be represented by means of a network of interacting parts. It is, in fact, the network organisation (more than the parts) what largely conditions most higher-level properties, which are not…
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…
Evolutionary algorithms have been successfully applied to a variety of optimisation problems in stationary environments. However, many real world optimisation problems are set in dynamic environments where the success criteria shifts…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology and Artificial Life (Bonner, 1988; Bedau et al., 2000). Complexification has been interpreted in different ways: as a process of diversification between evolving units…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Modularity has been widely studied as a mechanism to improve the capabilities of neural networks through various techniques such as hand-crafted modular architectures and automatic approaches. While these methods have sometimes shown…
Identifying and understanding modular organizations is centrally important in the study of complex systems. Several approaches to this problem have been advanced, many framed in information-theoretic terms. Our treatment starts from the…
Biological systems are generally complicated and/or complex. In the former approach, one sets up a model with a large number of parameters to describe the system in detail. The latter approach focuses on understanding the universal aspects…
Complementarity among species with different traits is one of the basic processes affecting biodiversity, defined as the number of species in the ecosystem. We present here a soluble model ecosystem in which the species are characterized by…
Wagner's modularity inducing problem domain is a key contribution to the study of the evolution of modularity, including both evolutionary theory and evolutionary computation. We study its behavior under classical genetic algorithms. Unlike…