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Open-Ended Behavioral Complexity for Evolved Virtual Creatures (2013)
Author: Dan Lessin, Don Fussell, Risto Miikkulainen
In the 19 years since Karl Sims' landmark publication on evolving virtual creatures (Sims, 1994), much of the future work he proposed has been implemented, having a significant impact on multiple fields including graphics, evolutionary computation, and artificial life. There has, however been one notable exception to this progress. Despite the potential benefits, there has been no clear increase in the behavioral complexity of evolved virtual creatures (EVCs) beyond the light following demonstrated in Sims' original work. This paper presents an open-ended method to move beyond this limit, making use of high-level human input in the form of a syllabus of intermediate learning tasks--along with mechanisms for preservation, reuse, and combination of previously learned tasks. This method (named ESP for its three components: encapsulation, syllabus, and pandemonium) is employed to evolve a virtual creature with behavioral complexity that clearly exceeds previously achieved levels. ESP thus demonstrates that EVCs may indeed have the potential to one day rival the behavioral complexity--and therefore the entertainment value--of their non-virtual counterparts.
People
Risto Miikkulainen
Faculty
risto [at] cs utexas edu
Dan Lessin
Ph.D. Alumni
dlessin [at] cs utexas edu
Projects
The Role of Emotion and Communication in Cooperative Behavior
2013 - 2016
Learning Strategic Behavior in Sequential Decision Tasks
2009 - 2014
Publications
Open-Ended Behavioral Complexity for Evolved Virtual Creatures
Dan Lessin, Don Fussell, Risto Miikkulainen
In
Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2013
, 2013.
2013
Evolved Virtual Creatures as Content: Increasing Behavioral and Morphological Complexity
Dan Lessin
PhD Thesis, Computer Science Department, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, December ...
2014
Areas of Interest
Evolutionary Computation
Neuroevolution
Control
Artificial Life