This paper investigates speciation in NEAT and its effect on NEAT's performance. Speciation is the set of processes by which NEAT creates, maintains and uses several disjoint groups of similar genomes for guiding reproduction. This paper also examines the issue of adoption, where mating within a species produces an individual in a different species. It then examines the relationship between NEAT's performance, the adoption rate and the number of species. The paper demonstrates that while species and adoptions are necessary, too many species and adoptions harm the algorithm's performance.

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Technical Report HR-10-06, Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, 2010.

@techreport{nodine:ugthesis10, title={Speciation in NEAT}, author={Timothy Nodine}, number={HR-10-06}, institution={Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin}, type={Undergraduate Honors Thesis}, url="http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?nodine:ugthesis10", year={2010} }