Toward the construction of a virtual ecosystem by evolving virtual creature's behaviours

In this paper a virtual ecosystem environment with basic physical law and energy concept has been proposed, this ecosystem is populated with 3D virtual creatures that are living in this environment in order to forage food. Artificial behaviours are developed to control virtual creatures. A genetic algorithm with an artificial neural network were implemented together to guarantee some of these behaviours like searching food. Foods are presented in different locations in the virtual ecosystem. The evolutionary process uses the physical properties of the virtual creatures and an external fitness function that will conduct to the expected behaviours. The experiment evolving locomoting virtual creatures show that these virtual creatures try to obtain at least one of the food sources presented in its trajectory. Our best-evolved creatures are able to reach multiple food sources during the simulation time.

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