Communication plays a vital role in the organization and operation of biological, computational, economic, and social systems. Agents often base their behavior on the signals they receive from others and also recognize the importance of the signals they send. Here we develop a framework for...

The evolution of cooperation in the repeated prisoner's dilemma depends on the conditions under which the game is played. The results of a series of computer simulations show that the emergence of cooperative play in the game is strongly affected by the localisations of both interaction and...

The paper describes the application of Genetic Algorithms to a Resource Economics problem; the decision about the intensity of exploitation of a renewable resource. Genetic Algorithms, developed by HOLLAND (1975), are a model of biological evolution, that captures some important features of...

In this paper we introduce a new approach to optimization problems based on a previous theoretical work on extinction patterns in macroevolution. We name them Macroevolutionary Algorithms (MA). Unlike population-level evolution, which is employed in standard genetic algorithms, evolution at the...

Environmental and biotic factors regulate species abundance and the composition of ecological communities. However, it is difficult to demonstrate principles of community assembly in nature due to observational limitations and historical effects. Numerical simulation can be used to evaluate...

Fitness distance correlation (FDC) has been offered as a summary statistic with apparent success in predicting the performance of genetic algorithms for global optimization. Here, a counterexample to Hamming-distance based FDC is examined for what it reveals about how GAs work. The...

Current techniques of DNA analysis enable the scoring of hundreds of electrophoretic bands using a small amount of DNA from an individual. The sample size in pilot experiments is typically orders of magnitude smaller then the number of bands contained in a molecular profile. Nevertheless, it is...

Previous work on coevolutionary search has demonstrated both successful and unsuccessful applications. As a step in explaining what factors lead to success or failure, we present a comparative study of an evolutionary and a coevolutionary search model. In the latter model, strategies for solving...

Can we build computers that are intelligent and alive? This question has been on the minds of computer scientists since the dawn of the computer age and remains a most compelling line of inquiry. Some would argue that the question makes sense only if we put scare quotes around "intelligent" and...

Evolving one-dimensional cellular automata (CAs) with genetic algorithms has provided insight into how improved performance on a task requiring global coordination emerges when only local interactions are possible. Two approaches that can affect the search efficiency of the genetic algorithm are...