Self-Protection and Diversity in Self-Replicating Cellular Automata

The concept of "self-protection", a capability of an organism to protect itself from exogenous attacks, is introduced to the design of artificial evolutionary systems as a possible method to create and maintain diversity in the population. Three different mechanisms of self-protection are considered and implemented on a cellular automata based evolutionary system, the evoloop. Simulation results imply a positive effect of those mechanisms on diversity maintenance, especially when the self-protection is moderate so that it conserves both the attacker and the attacked. This article briefly reports the models and the simulation results obtained using those models.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: ALIFE
• Authors: Hiroki Sayama
• Keywords: ALIFE 2004, ALIFE 2007, Artificial Evolutionary Systems, Exogenous Attacks, Self-protection