Why are Evolved Developing Organisms also Fault-Tolerant?
Diego Federici and Tom Ziemke
Simulation of Adaptive Behavior 2006 (SAB 2006)
Rome, Italy, 25-29 September 2006
Summary
It has been suggested that evolving growth programs instead of direct genotype-phenotype mappings may increase the scalability of Genetic Algorithms. Many of these Artificial Embryogeny (AE) models have been proposed and their evolutionary properties are being investigated. One of these properties concerns the fault-tolerance of at least a particular class of AE, which models the development of artificial multicellular organisms. It has been shown that such AE evolves designs capable of recovering phenotypic faults during development, even if fault-tolerance is not selected for during evolution. This adaptive behaviour is clearly very interesting both for theoretical and practical reasons.
In this paper we provide empirical evidence collected from a multicellular AE model showing a subtle relationship between evolution and development. These results offer an explanation on why fault-tolerance necessarily emerges during evolution.