Abstract
Of all the issues discussed at Alife VII: Looking
Forward, Looking Backward, the issue of whether it was
possible to create an artificial life system that
exhibits open-ended evolution of novelty is by far the
biggest. Of the 14 open problems settled on as a result
of debate at the conference, some 6 are directly, or
indirectly related to this issue. Most people equate
open-ended evolution with complexity growth, although a
priori these seem to be different things. In this paper
I report on experiments to measure the complexity of
Tierran organisms, and show the results for a
size-neutral run of Tierra. In this run, no increase in
organismal complexity was observed, although organism
size did increase through the run. This result is
discussed, offering some signposts on path to solving
the issue of open ended evolution.
Users
Please
log in to take part in the discussion (add own reviews or comments).