Related papers: Self-adaptive exploration in evolutionary search
We study a minimal model for the growth of a phenotypically heterogeneous population of cells subject to a fluctuating environment in which they can replicate (by exploiting available resources) and modify their phenotype within a given…
1) Micro-evolutionary predictions are complicated by ecological feedbacks like density dependence, while ecological predictions can be complicated by evolutionary change. A widely used approach in micro-evolution, quantitative genetics,…
Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…
Population structure can be modelled by evolutionary graphs, which can have a substantial, but very subtle influence on the fate of the arising mutants. Individuals are located on the nodes of these graphs, competing with each other to…
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…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
All possible phenotypes are not equally accessible to evolving populations. In fact, only phenotypes of large size, i.e. those resulting from many different genotypes, are found in populations of sequences, presumably because they are…
Finding a good compromise between the exploitation of known resources and the exploration of unknown, but potentially more profitable choices, is a general problem, which arises in many different scientific disciplines. We propose a…
Research into several aspects of robot-enabled reconnaissance of random fields is reported. The work has two major components: the underlying theory of information acquisition in the exploration of unknown fields and the results of…
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…
Meta-Reinforcement learning approaches aim to develop learning procedures that can adapt quickly to a distribution of tasks with the help of a few examples. Developing efficient exploration strategies capable of finding the most useful…
In models for the evolution of predation from initially purely competitive species interactions, the propensity of predation is most often assumed to be a direct consequence of the relative morphological and physiological traits of…
I describe a framework for adaptive scientific exploration based on iterating an Observation--Inference--Design cycle that allows adjustment of hypotheses and observing protocols in response to the results of observation on-the-fly, as data…
Modern data is messy and high-dimensional, and it is often not clear a priori what are the right questions to ask. Instead, the analyst typically needs to use the data to search for interesting analyses to perform and hypotheses to test.…
We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
We proposed a new search heuristic using the scuba diving metaphor. This approach is based on the concept of evolvability and tends to exploit neutrality in fitness landscape. Despite the fact that natural evolution does not directly select…
The balance of exploration versus exploitation (EvE) is a key issue on evolutionary computation. In this paper we will investigate how an adaptive controller aimed to perform Operator Selection can be used to dynamically manage the EvE…
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.…
Fitness landscapes are mappings between genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness that shape evolution. In recent years, empirical work and theoretical models have greatly advanced our understanding of how populations navigate rugged fitness…