@inproceedings {2008, title = {Evolving Morphological and Behavioral Diversity Without Predefined Behavior Primitives}, booktitle = {Artificial Life XI: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems}, year = {2008}, month = {08/2008}, pages = {474{\textendash}481}, publisher = {MIT Press}, organization = {MIT Press}, address = {Winchester, UK}, abstract = {Virtual ecosystems, where natural selection is used to evolve complex agent behavior, are often preferred to traditional genetic algorithms because the absence of an explicitly defined fitness allows for a less constrained evolutionary process. However, these model ecosystems typically pre-specify a discrete set of possible action primitives the agents can perform. We think that this also constrains the evolutionary process with the modellers preconceptions of what possible solutions could be. Therefore, we propose an ecosystem model to evolve complete agents where all higher-level behavior results strictly from the interplay between extremely simple components and where no {\textquoteleft}behavior primitives{\textquoteright} are defined. On the basis of four distinct survival strategies we show that such primitives are not necessary to evolve behavioral diversity even in a simple and homogeneous environment.}, isbn = {978-0-262-75017-2}, url = {https://mitpress-request.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/alife/0262287196chap62.pdf}, author = {Pichler, Peter-Paul and Lola Ca{\~n}amero}, editor = {Seth Bullock and Jason Noble and Richard A. Watson and Mark A Bedau} } @inproceedings {2007, title = {An Evolving Ecosystems Approach to Generating Complex Agent Behaviour}, booktitle = {Proc. IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life 2007, ALIFE{\textquoteright}07}, year = {2007}, month = {04/2007}, pages = {303{\textendash}310}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = { Honolulu, HI}, 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 {\textquoteleft}grounded{\textquoteright} 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.}, isbn = {1-4244-0701-X}, issn = {2160-6374}, doi = {10.1109/ALIFE.2007.367810}, url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4218900/}, author = {Pichler, Peter-Paul and Lola Ca{\~n}amero} }