Evolutionary Dynamics Discovered via Visualization in the breve Simulation Environment

We report how breve, a simulation environment with rich 3d graphics, was used to discover significant patterns in the dynamics of a system that evolves controllers for swarms of goal-directed agents. These patterns were discovered via visualization in the sense that we had not considered their relevance or thought to look for them initially, but they became obvious upon visually observing the behavior of the system. In this paper we briefly describe breve and the system of evolving swarms that we implemented within it. We then describe two discovered properties of the evolutionary dynamics of the system: transitions to/from genetic drift regimes and the emergence of collective or multicellular organization. We comment more generally on the utility of 3d visualization for the discovery of biologically significant phenomena and briefly describe our ongoing work in this area. Pointers are provided to on-line resources including source code and animations that demonstrate several of the described effects. Associated links are available on-line at http://hampshire.edu/lspector/alife8-visualization.html. Evolutionary Dynamics Discovered via Visualization in the breve Simulation Environment Lee Spector Cognitive Science Hampshire College Amherst, MA 01002, USA lspector@hampshire.edu Jon Klein Physical Resource Theory, Chalmers U. of Technology and Göteborg University, SE-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden also: CS, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002, USA jklein@hampshire.edu