What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Noise and the Reality Gap: The Use of Simulation in Evolutionary Robotics
Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Advances in Artificial Life
Evolution of vision capabilities in embodied virtual creatures
Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This paper introduces the problem of floating-point rounding errors in physical simulation. A simple virtual creature is simulated in a physical environment for a specified number of time steps. The effect of rounding errors is illustrated by varying the initial position of the creature which causes a change in the fitness value computed by a simple distance-based fitness function. With a large evaluation time, these rounding errors can produce significantly large differences in fitness. A discussion is provided on the importance of this finding for evolutionary simulations, including suggestions to alleviate the problem.