Long-Term Progress and Behavior Complexification in Competitive Co-Evolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new competitive evolutionary algorithm that achieves long-term global progress by filtering opportunistic variations, validated through predator-prey robot co-evolution, leading to more articulated behaviors over generations.

Contribution

A novel competitive algorithm that promotes long-term progress by filtering out opportunistic variations, enhancing behavior complexity in co-evolving robots.

Findings

The new method produces sustained global progress over many generations.

Evolved behaviors become more articulated and complex.

Progress in performance does not always correlate with behavior complexity.

Abstract

The possibility to use competitive evolutionary algorithms to generate long-term progress is normally prevented by the convergence on limit cycle dynamics in which the evolving agents keep progressing against their current competitors by periodically rediscovering solutions adopted previously over and over again. This leads to local but not to global progress, i.e. progress against all possible competitors. We propose a new competitive algorithm that produces long-term global progress by identifying and by filtering out opportunistic variations, i.e. variations leading to progress against current competitors and retrogression against other competitors. The efficacy of the method is validated on the co-evolution of predator and prey robots, a classic problem that has been used in other related researches. The accumulation of global progress over many generations leads to effective solutions that involve the production of rather articulated behaviors. The complexity of the behavior displayed by the evolving robots increases across generations although progresses in performance are not always accompanied by behavior complexification.