Related papers: Self-adaptive exploration in evolutionary search
Adaptive exploration methods propose ways to learn complex policies via alternating between exploration and exploitation. An important question for such methods is to determine the appropriate moment to switch between exploration and…
Genotype-to-phenotype mappings translate genotypic variations such as mutations into phenotypic changes. Neutrality is the observation that some mutations do not lead to phenotypic changes. Studying the search trajectories in genotypic and…
This paper presents a high-level conceptual framework to help orient the discussion and implementation of open-endedness in evolutionary systems. Drawing upon earlier work by Banzhaf et al., three different kinds of open-endedness are…
Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait subject to…
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this suggests an approach driven by evolutionary metaphor. On the…
Self-adaptation is used in all main paradigms of evolutionary computation to increase efficiency. We claim that the basis of self-adaptation is the use of neutrality. In the absence of external control neutrality allows a variation of the…
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…
Evolvability refers to the ability of an individual genotype (solution) to produce offspring with mutually diverse phenotypes. Recent research has demonstrated that divergent search methods, particularly novelty search, promote evolvability…
In the field of evolutionary robotics, choosing the correct encoding is very complicated, especially when robots evolve both behaviours and morphologies at the same time. With the objective of improving our understanding of the mapping…
The exploration of vast genotype spaces poses fundamental challenges for evolving populations. As the number of genotypes encoding viable phenotypes grows exponentially with genome length, populations can only explore a tiny fraction of…
Self-organization of complex morphological patterns from local interactions is a fascinating phenomenon in many natural and artificial systems. In the artificial world, typical examples of such morphogenetic systems are cellular automata.…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
In previous work I proposed a framework for thinking about open-ended evolution. The framework characterised the basic processes required for Darwinian evolution as: (1) the generation of a phenotype from a genetic description; (2) the…
The process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory's success…
Developing autonomous agents that quickly explore an environment and adapt their behavior online is a canonical challenge in robotics and machine learning. While humans are able to achieve such fast online exploration and adaptation, often…
Existing multi-strategy adaptive differential evolution (DE) commonly involves trials of multiple strategies and then rewards better-performing ones with more resources. However, the trials of an exploitative or explorative strategy may…
The capacity of cells and organisms to respond to challenging conditions in a repeatable manner is limited by a finite repertoire of pre-evolved adaptive responses. Beyond this capacity, cells can use exploratory dynamics to cope with a…
The fitness landscape encodes the mapping of genotypes to fitness and provides a succinct representation of possible trajectories followed by an evolving population. Evolutionary accessibility is quantified by the existence of…
Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state…