Open-Ended Artificial Evolution

Identifying Necessary Conditions for Open-Ended Evolution through the Artificial Life World of Chromaria

A full understanding of open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains elusive. While artificial life worlds have been proposed to study such dynamics and tests have been devised to try to detect them, no theory yet has enumerated the key conditions that are essential to inducing them. The aim of this paper is to further such an understanding by hypothesizing four conditions that are essential for op...

Prospects for Open-Ended Evolution in Artificial Life

Identifying Necessary Components for Open-Ended Evolution

A central goal of the field of artificial life is to build evolving systems that capture interesting dynamics of natural systems, producing evolutionary outcomes such as sophisticated navigation behaviors, novel cooperative strategies, complex ecosystems, or major evolutionary transitions, to name but a few. Such “open-ended” systems are sought after for a number of reasons: 1) For artificial l...

Requirements for Open-Ended Evolution in Natural and Artificial Systems

Open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains an elusive goal for artificial evolutionary systems. Many ideas exist in the biological literature beyond the basic Darwinian requirements of variation, differential reproduction and inheritance. I argue that these ideas can be seen as aspects of five fundamental requirements for open-ended evolution: (1) robustly reproductive individuals, (2) a medium a...

Artificial Life 13

This paper seeks to illuminate and quantify a feature of natural evolution that correlates to our sense of its intuitive greatness: Natural evolution evolves impressive artifacts. Within artificial life, abstractions aiming to capture what makes natural evolution so powerful often focus on the idea of openendedness, which relates to boundless diversity, complexity, or adaptation. However, creat...