Five built-in actions are available to each organism. Each is associated with network output nodes whose characters start with a particular bit-string:
01* 100* 101* 110*
Try to reproduce with organism in front Fight: Kill organism in front (if there is one) Turn anti-clockwise
62
111* Move forward (if nothing in the way)
For example, if a network output node has the character string 1101001, the organism will turn clockwise by an angle proportional to the node’s excitatory output. If an action has more than one matching network output node then the relevant output is the sum of these nodes’ excitatory outputs, bounded by unity as within any node. If an action has no output node with a matching character, then the relevant output is noise, at the same level as in the (other) nodes.
Both reproduce and fight are binary actions. They are applied if the relevant output exceeds a threshold and have no effect if the square in front is empty. To turn and move forward are done in proportion to output.
When an organism reproduce with a mate in front of it, the child is placed in the square beyond the mate if that square is empty. If it is not, the child replaces the mate. An organism cannot reproduce with an individual that is fighting if this would involve replacing that individual. Reproduction involves crossover and mutation. Life’s crossover always offsets the cut point in the sec- ond individual by one gene, with equal probability either way–which is why the genotype lengths vary. Mutation at reproduction is a single gene-flip(bit- flip). An organism’s network input nodes have their excitatory inputs set to the weighted sum of ‘ matching’ output nodes’ excitatory outputs from other individuals in the neighborhood. If the first bit of an input node’s character is 1 then the node takes its input from individuals to the right hand side (in- cluding forward-and back-right), otherwise from individuals to the left. An input node ‘matches’ an output node if the rest of the input node’s character is the same as the start of the character of the output node. For example, an input node with character 10011 matches(only) output nodes with character’s starting with 0011 in the networks of individuals to the right. Weighting is in- versely proportional to the Euclidean distances between individuals. Currently the input neighborhood is a 5 × 5 area centered on the relevant organism.
4.
Experimental Results
Kin similarity and convergence: When two Life organisms (with networks developed from more than just a couple of production rules each) reproduce, the child’s network almost always resembles a combination of the parents’ networks. Examination of networks from Life’s population at any time shows similarities between many of them. The population remains nearly converged, in small numbers of species, throughout the evolution. The criterion of a suf- ficiently correlated (implicit) fitness landscape has been met by the develop- mental system, making it suitable for long-term evolution.
Emergence of increasing complexity: Once Life has started, there is a short period while genotype lengths increase until capable of containing a produc- tion rule. For the next ten to twenty thousand time steps (in typical runs),
63
Figure 3. A neural network of a dominant organism.
networks resulting in very simple strategies such as ‘do everything’ and ‘al- ways go forwards and kill’ dominate the population. Some networks do better than others but not sufficiently well for them to display a dominating effects. In every run to date, the first dominant species that emerges has been one whose individuals turn in one direction while trying to fight and reproduce at the same time. Figure 3 shows an example of such an individual, after the user dragged the nodes apart to make detailed examination possible. Note the outputs o101, o01 and o100 (turn anti-clockwise, reproduce and fight). Note also the large number of links necessary to pass from inputs to outputs, and the input char- acters which match non-action output characters of the same network (o000, o00). Individuals of this species use nearby members, who are also turning in circles, as sources of activation (so keeping each other going).
Although this is a very simple strategy, watching it in action makes its suc- cess understandable. Imagine running around in a small circle stabbing the air in front of you. Anyone trying to attack would either have to get his timing exactly right or approach in a faster spiral–both relatively advanced strategies. These individuals also mate just before killing. The offspring (normally) ap- pear beyond the individual being killed, away from the killer’s path. Because of the success of this first dominant species, the world always has enough space for other organisms to exist. Such organisms tend not to last long; almost any movement will bring them into contact with one of the dominant organisms. Hence these organisms share some of the network morphology of the dominant species. However, they can make some progress: Individuals have emerged that are successful at turning to face the dominant species and holding their di- rection while trying to kill and reproduce. An example of such a ‘rebel’ (from the same run as Figure 3 is shown in Figure 4.
Running averages of the number of organisms reproducing and killing (Fig- ure 5) suggest that further species emerge. However, organisms have proved
64
Figure 4. A neural network of a rebel organism.
Figure 5. Typical running averages of the number of organisms reproducing and killing. difficult to analyze beyond the above, even at the behavioral level. All that can currently be said is that they share characteristics of the previous species but are different.
5.
Conclusions
The algorithm proposed in this paper is novel, feasible. Although the behav- iors that emerged are very low-level, they are encouraging nonetheless, for the increases in complexity were in ways not specified by the design. It is difficult to evaluate any ongoing emergence because of the difficulty in analyzing later
65 organisms. Either tools to aid in such analysis will have to be constructed, or a more transparent system should be created.
In work involving pure natural selection, the organisms’ developmental and interaction systems are analogous to the fitness functions of conventional ge- netic algorithms. While the general aim involves moving away from such comparisons, the analogy is useful for recognizing how the epistasis of fitness landscape issue transfers across: Certain ontogenetic and interaction systems can result in individuals with similar genotypes but very different phenotypes. The results show that Life’s developmental system does not suffer from this problem, making it suitable for long-term incremental evolution. This is a sig- nificant result for a modular developmental system.
This work has made it clear that the specification of actions, even at a low- level, results in the organisms being constrained around these actions and limits evolution. Alternatives in which the embodiment of organisms is linked to their actions that need to be further investigated.
1
2
3
The evolutionary robots can learn and integrate the visual behaviors and attention autonomously with biologically motivated visual behaviors co- operated as parallel, complementary and “highly coupled processes” in the tracking systems, simplifying the acquisition of perceptual informa- tion and system modeling and control;
Combining competitive coevolutionary genetic programming with evo- lutionary learning, and creating evolutionary robotics with advanced com- plex vision systems, performing more complex obstacle avoidance be- havior and target approach activity;
Evolutionary robots can solve out problems on obstacle avoidance and target approach autonomously by self-learning environments knowledge based on competitive coevolutionary genetic programming.