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How artificial ontogenies can retard evolution

Published: 25 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Recently there has been much interest in the role of indirect genetic encodings; as a means to achieve increased evolvability. From this perspective, artificial ontogenies have largely been seen as a vehicle to relate the indirect encodings to complex phenotypes. However, the introduction of a development phase does not come without other consequences. We show that the conjunction of the latent ontogenic structure and the common practice of only evaluating the final phenotype obtained from development can have a net retarding effect on evolution. Using a formal model of development, we show that this effect arises primarily due to the relation between the ontogenic structure to the fitness function, which in turn impacts the properties being evaluated and selected for during evolution. This effect is empirically demonstrated with a toy search problem using LOGO-turtle based embryogenic processes.

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  • (2015)Growing and Evolving Vibrationally Actuated Soft RobotsProceedings of the Companion Publication of the 2015 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/2739482.2768485(1221-1224)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2015
  • (2013)Heterochronic scaling of developmental durations in evolved soft robotsProceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation10.1145/2463372.2463466(743-750)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2013
  • (2011)On Synergistic Interactions Between Evolution, Development and Layered LearningIEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation10.1109/TEVC.2011.215075215:3(287-312)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2011
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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '05: Proceedings of the 7th annual workshop on Genetic and evolutionary computation
June 2005
431 pages
ISBN:9781450378000
DOI:10.1145/1102256
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 25 June 2005

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  1. development
  2. evolutionary algorithms
  3. evolvability
  4. generative representations
  5. problem solving

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Cited By

View all
  • (2015)Growing and Evolving Vibrationally Actuated Soft RobotsProceedings of the Companion Publication of the 2015 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/2739482.2768485(1221-1224)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2015
  • (2013)Heterochronic scaling of developmental durations in evolved soft robotsProceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation10.1145/2463372.2463466(743-750)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2013
  • (2011)On Synergistic Interactions Between Evolution, Development and Layered LearningIEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation10.1109/TEVC.2011.215075215:3(287-312)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2011
  • (2010)Artificial Embryogeny for Network Structures and its application for a Robot Generation Taskネットワーク構造生成のための胚発生型進化アルゴリズムとロボット生成問題への適用Transactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence10.1527/tjsai.25.42325:3(423-432)Online publication date: 2010
  • (2010)A survey of evolutionary and embryogenic approaches to autonomic networkingComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2009.08.02154:6(944-959)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2010
  • (2008)Evolutionary and embryogenic approaches to autonomic systemsProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2008.4514(1-12)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2008
  • (2008)An evolvability-enhanced artificial embryogeny for generating network structuresProceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation10.1145/1389095.1389258(835-842)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2008
  • (2008)Learning General Solutions through Multiple Evaluations during DevelopmentProceedings of the 8th international conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware10.1007/978-3-540-85857-7_18(201-212)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2008
  • (2007)Extending artificial developmentProceedings of the 7th international conference on Evolvable systems: from biology to hardware10.5555/1792161.1792196(297-308)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2007
  • (2007)Achieving environmental tolerance through the initiation and exploitation of external information2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation10.1109/CEC.2007.4424783(2485-2492)Online publication date: Sep-2007

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