Publication details
Exploring the Concept of Open-Ended Evolution
Tim Taylor
2012
Abstract
The term open-ended evolution ("OEE") is used by the ALife community to refer to the kind of long-term evolutionary dynamics observed in the biosphere. It is generally taken to refer to evolutionary systems which display a continual production of adaptively significant innovations. Furthermore, some authors use the term to imply a sustained increase in complexity and/or diversity of some components of the evolving system; a system capable of open-ended evolution could spontaneously generate rich ecosystems of complex organisms. For ALife practitioners who seek to build virtual worlds capable of OEE, there is a need for a particular type of understanding of the issues involved; in addition to the analytic understanding of evolutionary dynamics provided by theoretical biologists, there is also the need for a synthetic understanding of how to design systems that can produce these dynamics. In the following paragraphs, an attempt is made to unpack the concept of OEE into a number of separate (but related) issues, with particular focus on issues which apply to the synthesis of OEE systems.
Reference
Taylor, T. (2012). Exploring the Concept of Open-Ended Evolution. In C. Adami, D. M. Bryson, C. Ofria, & R. T. Pennock (Eds.), Artificial Life 13: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (pp. 540–541). MIT Press.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{taylor2012exploring,
author = {Taylor, Tim},
title = {Exploring the Concept of Open-Ended Evolution},
booktitle = {Artificial Life 13: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems},
year = {2012},
editor = {Adami, Christoph and Bryson, David M. and Ofria, Charles and Pennock, Robert T.},
pages = {540--541},
publisher = {{MIT} Press},
category = {conference},
keywords = {oee}
}