Related papers: Organismal Agency and Rapid Adaptation: The Phenop…
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 the evolution of artificial learning systems by means of selection. Genetic programming is used to generate a sequence of populations of algorithms which can be used by neural networks for supervised learning of a rule that…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
The last few years have witnessed substantial progress in the field of embodied AI where artificial agents, mirroring biological counterparts, are now able to learn from interaction to accomplish complex tasks. Despite this success,…
Many biological processes have been the source of inspiration for heuristic methods that generate high-quality solutions to solve optimization and search problems. This thesis presents an epigenetic technique for Evolutionary Algorithms,…
Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece in a fully predictive theory of evolution. We refer to this generally as the problem of the genotype-phenotype map.…
It has been widely recognized that the performance of a multi-agent system is highly affected by its organization. A large scale system may have billions of possible ways of organization, which makes it impractical to find an optimal choice…
We present a benchmark study of autonomous, chemical agents exhibiting associative learning of an environmental feature. Associative learning has been widely studied in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, but are most commonly…
In genetic systems there is a non-trivial interface between the sequence of symbols which constitutes the chromosome, or ``genotype'', and the products which this sequence encodes --- the ``phenotype''. This interface can be thought of as a…
This paper presents the thesis that all learning agents of finite information size are limited by their informational structure in what goals they can efficiently learn to achieve in a complex environment. Evolutionary change is critical…
We propose an artificial life framework aimed at facilitating the emergence of intelligent organisms. In this framework there is no explicit notion of an agent: instead there is an environment made of atomic elements. These elements contain…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence has outpaced the conceptual tools needed to characterize agency in computational systems. Prevailing definitions mainly rely on autonomy and goal-directedness. Here, we argue for a…
What role does phenotypic complexity play in the systems-level function of an embodied agent? The organismal phenotype is a topologically complex structure that interacts with a genotype, developmental physics, and an informational…
Biological organisms exhibit diverse strategies for adapting to varying environments. For example, a population of organisms may express the same phenotype in all environments (`unvarying strategy'), or follow environmental cues and express…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Natural selection is general and powerful concept not only to explain evolutionary processes of biological organisms but also to design engineering systems such as genetic algorithms and particle filters. There is a surge of interest, both…
Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…
Biological phenotypes are products of complex evolutionary processes in which selective forces influence multiple biological trait measurements in unknown ways. Phylogenetic factor analysis disentangles these relationships across the…
We present a model for evolving agents using both genetic and cultural inheritance mechanisms. Within each agent our model maintains two distinct information stores we call the genome and the memome. Processes of adaptation are modeled as…