2018

Evolutionary Innovations and Where to Find Them: Routes to Open-Ended Evolution in Natural and Artificial Systems

Taylor, Tim

Understand

This paper presents a high-level conceptual framework to help orient the discussion and implementation of open-endedness in evolutionary systems.

  • Drawing upon earlier work by Banzhaf et al., three different kinds of open-endedness are identified: exploratory, expansive, and transformational.
  • These are characterised in terms of their relationship to the search space of phenotypic behaviours.
  • A formalism is introduced to describe three key processes required for an evolutionary process: the generation of a phenotype from a genetic description, the evaluation of that phenotype, and the reproduction with variation of individuals according to their evaluation.

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