The role of degenerate robustness in the evolvability of multi-agent systems in dynamic environments

Abstract

It has been proposed that degeneracy plays a fundamental role in biological evolution by facilitating robustness and adaptation within heterogeneous and time-variant environments. Degeneracy occurs whenever structurally distinct agents display similar functions within some contexts but unique functions in others. In order to test the broader applicability of this hypothesis, especially to the field of evolutionary dynamic optimisation, we evolve multi-agent systems (MAS) in time-variant environments and investigate how degeneracy amongst agents influences the system's robustness and evolvability. We find that degeneracy freely emerges within our framework, leading to MAS architectures that are robust towards a set of similar environments and quickly adaptable to large environmental changes. Detailed supplementary experiments, aimed particularly at the scaling behaviour of these results, demonstrate a broad range of validity for our findings and suggest that important general distinctions may exist between evolution in degenerate and non-degenerate agent-based systems. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.