Food Competition 1: follow camera

This video demonstrates evolved behavior in a computational ecosystem I developed as part of my PhD research.
The blue circles are obstacles which damage the agents and the green circles are food sources. Agents themselves are gray. The red lines are locomotive effectors which work a little like small jets (length indicating intensity). The colorful dots within the agents are sensors (green senses food sources, blue senses obstacle, etc).

The system is based on natural selection; agents can invest their own life energy (health) into creating offspring. Initially the system keeps creating agents with random configurations and no specific functionality. Eventually, an agent will manage to collect enough energy and reproduce and establish a sustained population. From that point on evolution can occur. Mutation during reproduction can arbitrarily add or remove sensors, effectors and components of the neural controller networks or change all of their parameters.
Even though there is no explicit fitness function or predefined functionality, diverse strategies for foraging behaviour and obstacle avoidance can be observed in the system.

For more information of what's actually going on:
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~pp6bs/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Artificial
• Life
• alife
• Evolution