Emergent distribution of computational workload in the evolution of an undulatory animat

Abstract

The coupling between an agent's body and its nervous system ensures that optimal behaviour generation can be undertaken in a specific niche. Depending on this coupling, nervous system or body plan architecture can partake in more or less of the behaviour. We will refer to this as the automatic distribution of computational workload. It is automatic since the coupling is evolved and not pre-specified. In order to investigate this further, we attempt to identify how, in models of undulatory fish, the coupling between body plan morphology and nervous system architecture should emerge in several constrained experimental setups. It is found that neural circuitry emerges minimalistically in all cases and that when certain body segmentation features are not coevolved, the agents exhibit higher levels of neural activity. On account of this, it is suggested that an unconstrained body plan morphology permits greater flexibility in the agent's ability to generate behaviour, whilst, if the body plan is constrained, flexibility is reduced with the result that the nervous system has to compensate. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.