Feedback from Main Population to Novelty Engine

With the main population/novelty engine setup, the idle time -- while the system is patiently waiting for human games to come in^3.3 -- is devoted to the fabrication of the best opponents we can come up with.

It is expected that an evolutionary algorithm should increase the quality of the new entities with every each generation. If there was no feedback from the front end back to the novelty engine, the latter would remain oblivious to the information being collected by the selective process acting on the foreground. We have proposed and implemented two ways for surviving agents to come back and reproduce in the novelty engine.

1.

Using them as trainers. A reasonable setting for coevolving Tron agents by self-play alone would have f=0. By setting f=15, some of the champions-against-people come back to the novelty engine to act as trainers. The hope is that, by transference, new agents are favored which are themselves good against people.

2.

Reintroducing them in the population. Successful agents can be simply reintroduced in the population to let them compete with the other coevolving robots and reproduce, provided they are successful against their peers.