CAP6938 Neuroevolution and Developmental Encoding Developmental Encoding 2

1. CAP6938Neuroevolution and Developmental EncodingDevelopmental Encoding 2 Dr. Kenneth Stanley October 9, 2006

2. Where is DE Useful? • Problems with regularities • Board games • Visual processing/image recognition • Pictures • Music • Puzzles • Architectures/morphologies • Brains • Bodies • Problems requiring high complexity • High-level cognition • Strategic thinking • Tactical thinking

3. Where is DE not Useful? • Problems without regularity • Pole balancing • Simple high-precision domains • Very small picture reproduction • Simple control tasks • Go to the food

4. DE Testing Paradox • DE is a mismatch for simple problems • Hard problems are too hard to just get started • Where do we begin?

5. Progress through Benchmarks • Visualization is most revealing • Observe growth and final product • Shapes and pictures are easy to analyze • What’s the first useful thing DE will do? Julian Miller’s French Flags http://www.elec.york.ac.uk/intsys/users/jfm7/french-flag/sld018.htm

6. Where does NEAT Fit In with DE? • If it’s a neural network, it’s obvious • If it’s just “genes,” it still works like NEAT • Need a way to get to a lot of genes • NEAT will complexify into the right number • Historical markings tell which gene is which • Speciation keeps innovation protected, incompatible individuals apart

7. Next Class: Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPNs) • Abstracting away development • A new kind of indirect encoding based on function composition • Theory and preliminary results Exploiting Regularity Without Development by Kenneth O. Stanley. To appear in: Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Developmental Systems. Meno Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2006 (8 pages)