Abstract
Properties such as continuity, locality, and modularity may seem necessary when designing representations and variation operators for evolutionary algorithms, but a closer look at what happens when evolutionary algorithms perform well reveals counterexamples to such schemes. Moreover, these variational properties can themselves evolve in sufficiently complex open-ended systems. These properties of evolutionary algorithms remain very much open questions.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, the Mathematical Biosciences Institute through National Science Foundation Award #DMS 0931642, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics, Stanford University. I thank Marcus W. Feldman for his hospitality during a visit to his group.
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Altenberg, L. Probing the axioms of evolutionary algorithm design: Commentary on “On the mapping of genotype to phenotype in evolutionary algorithms” by Peter A. Whigham, Grant Dick, and James Maclaurin. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 18, 363–367 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-017-9290-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-017-9290-3