Abstract
In nature, discrete alternative mating strategies have been observed in many different species. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of different mating strategies in a small colony of simulated robots, using our previously proposed framework for performing embodied evolution with a limited number of robots. The virtual agents can reproduce offspring by mating, i.e., an exchange of genotypes with another robot. In the experiments, we observed two individual mating strategies: 1) Roamer strategy, where the agents never wait for potential mating partners; and 2) Stayer strategy, where the agents wait for potential mating partners depending on their internal energy level, the distance to the mating partner’s tail-LED, and the distance to the closest battery. The most interesting finding was that in some simulations the evolution produced a mixture of mating strategies within the population, typically with a narrow roamer subpopulation and a broader stayer subpopulation with distinct differences in genotype, phenotype, behavior, and performance between the subpopulations.
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Elfwing, S., Uchibe, E., Doya, K. (2009). Emergence of Different Mating Strategies in Artificial Embodied Evolution. In: Leung, C.S., Lee, M., Chan, J.H. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5864. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10684-2_71
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10684-2_71
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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