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Cell Tracking: Genesis and Epigenesis in an Artificial Organism

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4648))

Abstract

This paper belongs to the field of Computational Development. It describes a method that has the objective to provide an effective way of generating arbitrary shapes by using evolutionary-developmental techniques, i.e. by evolving genomes that guide the development of the organism starting from a single cell. The key feature of the method is the explicit introduction of an epigenetic memory, that is a cell variable that is modified during the development process and can take different values in different cells. This variable represents the source of differentiation, that leads different cells to read out different portions of the genome at different times. Preliminary experiments have been performed and the results appear to be quite encouraging: the proposed method was able to evolve a number of 25x25, 32x48 and 64x64 target shapes.

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Fernando Almeida e Costa Luis Mateus Rocha Ernesto Costa Inman Harvey António Coutinho

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Fontana, A. (2007). Cell Tracking: Genesis and Epigenesis in an Artificial Organism. In: Almeida e Costa, F., Rocha, L.M., Costa, E., Harvey, I., Coutinho, A. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4648. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74913-4_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74913-4_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74912-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74913-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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