Testing Punctuated Equilibrium Theory Using Evolutionary Activity Statistics
ACAL '09 Proceedings of the 4th Australian Conference on Artificial Life: Borrowing from Biology
In silicon no one can hear you scream: evolving fighting creatures
EuroGP'08 Proceedings of the 11th European conference on Genetic programming
Evolutionary synthesis of collective behavior
CollSec'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Collaborative methods for security and privacy
Towards an autonomous evolution of non-biological physical organisms
ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part I
Size selection and adaptive evolution in an artificial chemistry
Artificial Life
Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Long-term evolutionary dynamics in heterogeneous cellular automata
Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
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Bedau et al.'s statistical classification system for long-term evolutionary dynamics provides a test for open-ended evolution. Making this test more rigorous, and passing it, are two of the most important open problems for research into systems of agents that actively process and transform their environment. This paper presents a detailed description of the application of this test to `Geb', a system designed to verify and extend theories behind the generation of evolutionarily emergent systems. The result is that, according to these statistics, Geb exhibits unbounded evolutionary dynamics, making it the first autonomous artificial system to pass this test. However, having passed it, the most prudent course of action is to look for weaknesses in the test. The test is criticized, most significantly with regard to its normalization method for artificial systems. Furthermore, this paper presents a modified normalization method, based on component activity normalization, that overcomes these criticisms. The results of the revised test, when applied to Geb, indicate that this system does indeed exhibit open-ended evolution.