Common Developmental Genomes Revisited – Evolution Through Adaptation

Abstract

Artificial development has been widely used for designing complex structures and as a means to increase the complexity of an artifact. One central challenge in artificial development is to understand how a mapping process could work on a class of architectures in a more general way by exploiting the most favorable properties from each computational architecture or by combining efficiently more than one computational architectures (i.e., a true multicellular approach). Computational architectures in this context comprise structures with connected computational elements, namely, cellular automata and boolean networks. The ability to develop and co-evolve different computational architectures has previously been investigated using common developmental genomes. In this paper, we extend a previous work that studied their evolvability. Here, we focus on their ability to evolve when the goal changes over evolutionary time (i.e., adaptation), utilizing a more fair fitness assignment scheme. In addition, we try to investigate how common developmental genomes exploit the underlying architecture in order to build the phenotypes. The results show that they are able to find very good solutions with rather simplified solutions than anticipated.