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Selection for group-level efficiency leads to self-regulation of population size

Published: 12 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In general, a population will grow until a limiting factor, such as resource availability, is reached. However, increased task efficiency can also regulate the size of a population during task development. Through the use of digital evolution, we demonstrate that the evolution of a group-level task, requiring a small number of individuals, can cause a population to self-regulate its size, even in the presence of abundant energy. We also show that as little as a 1% transfer of energy from a parent group to its offspring produces significantly better results than no energy transfer. A potential application of this result is the configuration and management of real-world distributed agent-based systems.

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Cited By

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  • (2011)Investigations of Wilson’s and Traulsen’s Group Selection Models in Evolutionary ComputationAdvances in Artificial Life. Darwin Meets von Neumann10.1007/978-3-642-21314-4_1(1-9)Online publication date: 2011
  • (2009)Investigations of Wilson's and Traulsen's group selection models in evolutionary computationProceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part II10.5555/2017762.2017764(1-9)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2009
  • (2008)Evolution of Adaptive Population Control in Multi-agent SystemsProceedings of the 2008 Second IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems10.1109/SASO.2008.56(181-190)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2008

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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '08: Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
July 2008
1814 pages
ISBN:9781605581309
DOI:10.1145/1389095
  • Conference Chair:
  • Conor Ryan,
  • Editor:
  • Maarten Keijzer
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: 12 July 2008

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Author Tags

  1. artificial life
  2. cooperative behavior
  3. digital evolution
  4. multi-agent systems
  5. selection
  6. self-regulation

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Cited By

View all
  • (2011)Investigations of Wilson’s and Traulsen’s Group Selection Models in Evolutionary ComputationAdvances in Artificial Life. Darwin Meets von Neumann10.1007/978-3-642-21314-4_1(1-9)Online publication date: 2011
  • (2009)Investigations of Wilson's and Traulsen's group selection models in evolutionary computationProceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part II10.5555/2017762.2017764(1-9)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2009
  • (2008)Evolution of Adaptive Population Control in Multi-agent SystemsProceedings of the 2008 Second IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems10.1109/SASO.2008.56(181-190)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2008

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