Artificial Development

Abstract

Development as it occurs in biological organisms is defined as the process of gene activity that directs a sequence of cellular events in an organism which brings about the profound changes that occur to the organism. Hence, the many chemical and physical processes which translate the vast genetic information gathered over the evolutionary history of an organism, and put it to use to create a fully formed, viable adult organism from a single cell, is subsumed under the term development. This also includes properties of development that go way beyond the formation of organisms such as, for instance, mechanisms that maintain the stability and functionality of an organism throughout its lifetime, and properties that make development an adaptive process capable of shaping an organism to match---within certain bounds---the conditions and requirements of a given environment. Considering these capabilities from a computer science or engineering angle quickly leads on to ideas of taking inspiration from biological examples and translating their capabilities, generative construction, resilience and the ability to adapt, to man-made systems. The aim is thereby to create systems that mimic biology sufficiently so that these desired properties are emergent, but not as excessively as to make the construction or operation of a system infeasible as a result of complexity or implementation overheads. Software or hardware processes aiming to achieve this are referred to as artificial developmental models. This chapter therefore focuses on motivating the use of artificial development, provides an overview of existing models and a recipe for creating them, and discusses two example applications of image processing and robot control.