How does complexity evolve in artificial and natural systems? A central concept within genetic systems is epistasis, namely the modulation of the effects of a given gene by one or several other genes. Epistasis is known to have an impact on many features of organisms, from recombination and sex to the ruggedness of the underlying fitness landscapes. However, the multi-scale nature of evolution ...

In this paper we apply a real-time evolving neural network which uses a hill-climbing algorithm capable of adapting not only a network’s synaptic weights but also its topology (creating a recurrent neural network). We then apply this network to a robot in a simulated environment. By equipping the robot with a minimal set of instincts and a short-term memory system (to facilitate reinforcement l...

The structural complexity of culture cannot be characterized by simply modeling cultural beliefs or inherited ideas. Formal computational and algorithmic models of culture have focused on the inheritance of discrete cultural units, which can be hard to define and map to practical contexts. In cultural anthropology, research involving structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives have helped...

Current robots spaces bifurcating blood vessels and Various machines navigation wheeled, caterpillar, wall and even snake also many caterpillar exploration Although devices lack adapting confinement. D to be con collapsed buildings, industrial and marine pipelines A relative invert of confinement. exploiting waves of muscular contractions that alternatively shorten and lengthen different portio...

According to the principles of embodied cognition, intelligent behavior must arise out of the coupled dynamics of an agent’s brain, body, and environment. This suggests that the morphological complexity of a robot should scale in relation to the complexity of its task environment. This idea is supported by recent work, which demonstrated that when evolving robot morphologies in simple and compl...

The variability selection hypothesis predicts the adoption of versatile behaviors and survival strategies, in response to increasingly variable environments. In hominin evolution the most apparent adaptation for versatility is the adoption of social learning. The hypothesis that social learning will be adopted over other learning strategies, such as individual learning, when individuals are fac...

Reservoir Computing (RC) is a computational model in which a trained readout layer interprets the dynamics of a component called a reservoir that is excited by external input stimuli. The reservoir is often constructed using homogeneous neural networks in which a neuron’s in-degree distributions as well as its functions are uniform. RC lends itself to computing with physical and biological syst...

Phylogenetic trees are constructed frequently in biological research to provide an understanding of the evolutionary history of the organisms being studied. Often, the actual phylogenetic tree is unknown and the phylogenetic tree constructed is an estimate. There are many methods of phylogenetic tree construction which fall into two main categories: distance-based methods and character-based me...

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...

Strong artificial life research is often thought to rely on Alife systems as sources of novel empirical data. It is hoped that by augmenting our observations of natural life, this novel data can help settle empirical questions, and thereby separate fundamental properties of living systems from those aspects that are merely contingent on the idiosyncrasies of terrestrial evolution. Some authors ...