Exploring the Concept of Open-Ended Evolution

Extended Abstract The term open-ended evolution (“OEE”) is used by the ALife community to refer to the kind of long-term evolutionary dynamics observed in the biosphere. It is generally taken to refer to evolutionary systems which display a continual production of adaptively significant innovations. Furthermore, some authors use the term to imply a sustained increase in complexity and/or diversity of some components of the evolving system; a system capable of open-ended evolution could spontaneously generate rich ecosystems of complex organisms. For ALife practitioners who seek to build virtual worlds capable of OEE, there is a need for a particular type of understanding of the issues involved; in addition to the analytic understanding of evolutionary dynamics provided by theoretical biologists, there is also the need for a synthetic understanding of how to design systems that can produce these dynamics. In the following paragraphs, an attempt is made to unpack the concept of OEE into a number of separate (but related) issues, with particular focus on issues which apply to the synthesis of OEE systems.