MITCHELL A . POTTERKENNETH A. DE JONG

SPEAKER: L IN, WEI-KAI (2008.12 .16)

Cooperative Coevolution: An Architecture for Evolving Coadapted Subcomponents

Introduction

To appear in Evolutionary Computation 8(1):1-29, 2000, The MIT Press

After the cooperative coevolutionary framework published in 1994

One of the major difficulties comes in finding subcomponents to “emerge” rather than being hand designed Evolving coadapted subcomponents

Cooperative Coevolution Architecture

Problem Decomposition

Both the number of species and in the ecosystem and the roles the species assume to be an emergent property of cooperative coevolution

“If evolution stagnates, it may be that there are too few species in the ecosystem from which to construct a good solution”

Initialize the species randomly and evaluate its individuals based only on the overall fitness of the ecosystem

The Algorithm

A species finds a niche where it can make a contribution, it will tend to exploit this area

If a species is unproductive, determined by the contribution its individuals make to the collaborations they participate in, the species will be destroyed

Otherwise it is keptStagnation can be detected

GLtftf )()(

Coevolving String Covers

Matching set M (of size N) and target set of size K

Different targets

Results

Given the number of species

Case Study in Emergent Problem Decomposition

Evolving cascade networks

Two-Spirals Problem

Black points (training data)

Experimental Results

Comparison

Conclusions and FutureWork

An architecture for evolving subcomponents as a collection of cooperating species

Explored the emergence of coadapted subcomponents in more detail through a case study involving neural network evolution