Embryogenic Scaffolding
- or -
Evolving Robust Assembly Procedures
Significant inroads in evolved morphology have been
made by approaches which use an embryogenic
development of genotype into phenotype. While many of these
works take into account a noisy environment when evaluating
the final phenotype, few consider a noisy development
environment, nor require that intermediate sub-stages of
development are in-of-themselves viable vis-a-vis the physics
of the environment.
I define buildability as follows: A phenotype is buildable if it can result from an embryogenic process that is subject to the constraints of
its environment at every stage of development
In this work, I impose the buildability constraint
on a simple embryogenic model coupled with a simple but
stochastic physics environment, and show that evolutionary
techniques can nonetheless overcome the constraint by means of
embryogenic scaffolding.
Last modified: Tue Oct 1 14:47:19 EDT 2002