Functional and structural topologies in evolved neural networks

Abstract

The topic of evolutionary trends in complexity has drawn much controversy in the artificial life community. Rather than investigate the evolution of overall complexity, here we investigate the evolution of topology of networks in the Polyworld artificial life system. Our investigation encompasses both the actual structure of neural networks of agents in this system, and logical or functional networks inferred from statistical dependencies between nodes in the networks. We find interesting trends across several topological measures, which together imply a trend of more integrated activity across the networks (with the networks taking on a more "small-world" character) with evolutionary time. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.