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Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…
Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic…
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…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
We study opinion dynamics in a population of interacting adaptive agents voting on a set of complex multidimensional issues. We consider agents which can classify issues into for or against. The agents arrive at the opinions about each…
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…
This paper presents a technique that combines the occurrence of certain events, as observed by different sensors, in order to detect and classify objects. This technique explores the extent of dependence between features being observed by…
One of the main motivations for the use of competitive coevolution systems is their ability to capitalise on arms races between competing species to evolve increasingly sophisticated solutions. Such arms races can, however, be hard to…
A central goal in ecology is to understand how biodiversity is maintained. Previous theoretical works have employed the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game as a toy model, demonstrating that population mobility is crucial in determining the…
Indirect reciprocity explains the evolution of cooperation by considering how our cooperative behavior toward someone is reciprocated by someone else who has observed us. A cohesive society has a shared norm that prescribes how to assess…
Could artificial intelligence ever become truly conscious in a functional sense; this paper explores that open-ended question through the lens of Life, a concept unifying classical biological criteria (Oxford, NASA, Koshland) with empirical…
Intelligent agents should be able to learn useful representations by observing changes in their environment. We model such observations as pairs of non-i.i.d. images sharing at least one of the underlying factors of variation. First, we…
An efficient policy search algorithm should estimate the local gradient of the objective function, with respect to the policy parameters, from as few trials as possible. Whereas most policy search methods estimate this gradient by observing…
Our wellbeing depends as much on our personal success, as it does on the success of our society. The realization of this fact makes cooperation a very much needed trait. Experiments have shown that rewards can elevate our readiness to…
It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that. Whereas most…
In past work, we developed a computational model of the evolution of symbiotic entities (Model-S), based on Conway's Game of Life. In this article, we examine three trends that biologists have observed in the evolution of symbiotes. (1)…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
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,…
This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in…
A key aspect of the design of evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms is studying their performance. Statistical comparisons are also a crucial part which allows for reliable conclusions to be drawn. In the present paper we gather…