Co-evolutionary dynamics on a deformable landscape

In order to use co-evolutionary techniques successfully one needs to investigate the dynamics of co-evolution. Assuming an open-ended evolutionary process, it would be desirable to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions which lead to a kind of arms race where species continually adapt in response to one another. In this paper we present a model of competitive co-evolution which is intended to investigate these conditions. In our model, co-evolving species are modeled as points which are placed randomly on a uniform landscape which is deformed by the species. The impact a species induces on its surrounding is not immediate. Instead, the deformation follows the species after some latency period. Evolution is modeled as a simple hill climbing process of the species. We investigate different conditions and their impact on the evolutionary dynamics. Some lead to stasis, some lead to cyclic behavior and others lead to an arms race.

[1]  Arantxa Etxeverria.  The Origins of Order , 1993 .

[2]  Elizabeth Sklar,et al.  Animal-animat coevolution: using the animal population as fitness function , 1998 .

[3]  W. Daniel Hillis,et al.  Co-evolving parasites improve simulated evolution as an optimization procedure , 1990 .

[4]  Craig W. Reynolds.  Competition, Coevolution and the Game of Tag , 1994 .

[5]  L. V. Valen,et al.  A new evolutionary law , 1973 .

[6]  J. Krebs,et al.  Arms races between and within species , 1979, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences.

[7]  Dave Cliff,et al.  Tracking the Red Queen: Measurements of Adaptive Progress in Co-Evolutionary Simulations , 1995, ECAL.

[8]  Dave Cliff,et al.  Protean behavior in dynamic games: arguments for the co-evolution of pursuit-evasion tactics , 1994 .

[9]  Stuart A. Kauffman,et al.  The origins of order , 1993 .

[10]  John J. Grefenstette,et al.  Evolvability in dynamic fitness landscapes: a genetic algorithm approach , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 Congress on Evolutionary Computation-CEC99 (Cat. No. 99TH8406).

[11]  R.W. Morrison,et al.  A test problem generator for non-stationary environments , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 Congress on Evolutionary Computation-CEC99 (Cat. No. 99TH8406).

[12]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Co-evolution of Pursuit and Evasion II: Simulation Methods and Results , 1996 .

[13]  Stefano Nolfi,et al.  Competitive co-evolutionary robotics: from theory to practice , 1998 .

[14]  Stefano Nolfi,et al.  God Save the Red Queen! Competition in Co-Evolutionary Robotics , 1997 .