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Division blocks and the open-ended evolution of development, form, and behavior

Published: 07 July 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We present a new framework for artificial life involving physically simulated, three-dimensional blocks called Division Blocks. Division Blocks can grow and shrink, divide and form joints, exert forces on joints, and exchange resources. They are controlled by recurrent neural networks that evolve, along with the blocks, by natural selection. Division Blocks are simulated in an environment in which energy is approximately conserved, and in which all energy derives ultimately from a simulated sun via photosynthesis. In this paper we describe our implementation of Division Blocks and some of the ways that it can support experiments on the open-ended evolution of development, form, and behavior. We also present preliminary data from simulations, demonstrating the reliable emergence of cooperative resource transactions.

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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '07: Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
July 2007
2313 pages
ISBN:9781595936974
DOI:10.1145/1276958
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 July 2007

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Author Tags

  1. artificial life
  2. breve
  3. development
  4. division blocks
  5. morphology
  6. open-ended evolution
  7. recurrent networks

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GECCO '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 266 of 577 submissions, 46%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

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