An Evolving Ecosystems Approach to Generating Complex Agent Behaviour

TitleAn Evolving Ecosystems Approach to Generating Complex Agent Behaviour
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2007
AuthorsPichler, P-P, Cañamero, L
Name of ProceedingsProc. IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life 2007, ALIFE'07
Pagination303–310
Date Published04/2007
PublisherIEEE
Conference Location Honolulu, HI
ISBN Number1-4244-0701-X
ISSN Number2160-6374
Abstract

We propose an evolving ecosystem approach to evolving complex agent behaviour based on the principle of natural selection. The agents start with very limited functional design and morphology and neural controllers are concurrently evolved as functional wholes. The agents are ‘grounded’ in an increasingly complex environment by a complex model metabolism and interaction dynamics. Furthermore, we introduce a novel criterion for evaluating differential reproductive success aimed at maximising evolutionary freedom. We also present first experimental results suggesting that this approach may be conducive to widening the scope of artificial evolution for the generation of agents exhibiting non-trivial behaviours in a complex ecosystem.

URLhttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4218900/
DOI10.1109/ALIFE.2007.367810