Swarm Systems as a Platform for Open-Ended Evolutionary Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper explores how heterogeneous swarm systems, like Swarm Chemistry, can serve as platforms for open-ended evolution, fostering continuous diversity and emergent behaviors without predefined goals.

Contribution

It reviews swarm systems as a basis for open-ended evolution, highlighting their design space, emergent properties, and potential for diverse applications.

Findings

Heterogeneous swarm systems enable open-ended evolutionary dynamics.

Swarm systems exhibit multiscale structures and diverse behaviors.

Emergent patterns demonstrate robustness and ecological interactions.

Abstract

Artificial swarm systems have been extensively studied and used in computer science, robotics, engineering and other technological fields, primarily as a platform for implementing robust distributed systems to achieve pre-defined objectives. However, such swarm systems, especially heterogeneous ones, can also be utilized as an ideal platform for creating *open-ended evolutionary dynamics* that do not converge toward pre-defined goals but keep exploring diverse possibilities and generating novel outputs indefinitely. In this article, we review Swarm Chemistry and its variants as concrete sample cases to illustrate beneficial characteristics of heterogeneous swarm systems, including the cardinality leap of design spaces, multiscale structures/behaviors and their diversity, and robust self-organization, self-repair and ecological interactions of emergent patterns, all of which serve as the driving forces for open-ended evolutionary processes. Applications to science, engineering, and art/entertainment as well as the directions of further research are also discussed.