On the Relationship between Environmental Noise and Modular Hierarchies

In the context of developmental representations, hierarchical modular composition is often cited as a requisite for scalable complexity, particularly in the presence of noise and error during development. In earlier work of ours (Rieffel & Pollack 2006), we demonstrated the ability of a modular representation to overcome errors due to noise in an Evolutionary Developmental system. In this paper, using the same model, we present some observations on the relationship between the level of noise in the environment and the structure of the hierarchies which emerge.