The Importance of Maintaining Behavioural Link Between Parents andO

In a recent study of evolutionary artiicial neural networks (EANNs) 1], it has been argued that a partial training process after an architectural mutation plays an important role in maintaining the behavioural link between parents and their oospring and thus is beneecial to the simulated evolution. This paper investigates the issue further through a number of experiments. The experimental results show that a closer behavioural link between parents and their oospring due to the partial training process does lead to better performance , i.e., evolved ANNs generalise better. The results also illustrate that given a xed amount of time there is an optimal balance of time between evolution and training (learning).