Long-Term Progress and Behavior Complexification in Competitive Co-Evolution
This addresses the issue of achieving global progress in competitive co-evolution for researchers in evolutionary algorithms and robotics, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of long-term progress in competitive evolutionary algorithms, which often converge to limit cycles, by proposing a new algorithm that filters out opportunistic variations, validated on predator-prey robot co-evolution with results showing accumulation of global progress and increased behavioral complexity.
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.