The Importance of Open-Endedness (for the Sake of Open-Endedness)
This is an incremental contribution to the debate on research priorities in artificial life and evolutionary systems.
The paper critiques a prior claim that open-ended evolution (OEE) research should focus on defining complexity and diversity rather than pursuing OEE itself, by applying a conceptual framework to a model to argue that studying OEE for its own sake is important.
A paper in the recent Artificial Life journal special issue on open-ended evolution (OEE) presents a simple evolving computational system that, it is claimed, satisfies all proposed requirements for OEE (Hintze, 2019). Analysis and discussion of the system are used to support the further claims that complexity and diversity are the crucial features of open-endedness, and that we should concentrate on providing proper definitions for those terms rather than engaging in "the quest for open-endedness for the sake of open-endedness" (Hintze, 2019, p. 205). While I wholeheartedly support the pursuit of precise definitions of complexity and diversity in relation to OEE research, I emphatically reject the suggestion that OEE is not a worthy research topic in its own right. In the same issue of the journal, I presented a "high-level conceptual framework to help orient the discussion and implementation of open-endedness in evolutionary systems" (Taylor, 2019). In the current brief contribution I apply my framework to Hinzte's model to understand its limitations. In so doing, I demonstrate the importance of studying open-endedness for the sake of open-endedness.