The ABCs of evolutionary design: investigating the evolvability of embryogenies for morphogenesis

Previous work investigated three types of embryogeny: External, Explicit, and Implicit. This paper focuses on the two most interesting embryogenies: explicit and implicit, investigating the evolvability and scalability of both embryogenies for morphogenesis. The problem set is that of evolving certain predefined shapes letters of the alphabet. The results show that both embryogenies are good at defining different morphologies, but significantly, the implicit embryogeny incurs no increase in genotype size as the problem is scaled.