The evolution of foraging in an open-ended simulation environment

  • Authors:

  • Tiago Baptista;Ernesto Costa

  • Affiliations:

  • CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal;CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • EPIA'11 Proceedings of the 15th Portugese conference on Progress in artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Throughout the last decades, Darwin's theory of natural selection has fueled a vast amount of research in the field of computer science, and more specifically in artificial intelligence. The majority of this work has focussed on artificial selection, rather than on natural selection. In this paper we study the evolution of agents' controllers in an open-ended scenario. To that end, we set up a multi-agent simulation inspired by the ant foraging task, and evolve the agents' brain (a rule list) without any explicit fitness function. We show that the agents do evolve sustainable foraging behaviors in this environment, and discuss some evolutionary conditions that seem to be important to achieve these results.