Incremental co-evolution of organisms: A new approach for optimization and discovery of strategies

Abstract

In the field of optimization and machine learning techniques, some very efficient and promising tools like Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Hill-Climbing have been designed. In this same field, the Evolving Non-Determinism (END) model presented in this paper proposes an inventive way to explore the space of states that, using the simulated "incremental" co-evolution of some organisms, remedies some drawbacks of these previous techniques and even allow this model to outperform them on some diffficult problems. This new model has been applied to the sorting network problem, a reference problem that challenged many computer scientists, and an original one-player game named Solitaire. For the first problem, the END model has been able to build from "scratch" some sorting networks as good as the best known for the 16-input problem. It even improved by one comparator a 25 years old result for the 13-input problem. For the Solitaire game, END evolved a strategy comparable to a human designed strategy.