--- layout: default --- Publication details Exploring the Concept of Open-Ended Evolution Tim Taylor 2012 Abstract The term open-ended evolution ("OEE") is used by the ALife community to refer to the kind of long-term evolutionary dynamics observed in the biosphere. It is generally taken to refer to evolutionary systems which display a continual production of adaptively significant innovations. Furthermore, some authors use the term to imply a sustained increase in complexity and/or diversity of some components of the evolving system; a system capable of open-ended evolution could spontaneously generate rich ecosystems of complex organisms. For ALife practitioners who seek to build virtual worlds capable of OEE, there is a need for a particular type of understanding of the issues involved; in addition to the analytic understanding of evolutionary dynamics provided by theoretical biologists, there is also the need for a synthetic understanding of how to design systems that can produce these dynamics. In the following paragraphs, an attempt is made to unpack the concept of OEE into a number of separate (but related) issues, with particular focus on issues which apply to the synthesis of OEE systems. Full text Author preprint: pdf Poster: pdf Reference Taylor, T. (2012). Exploring the Concept of Open-Ended Evolution. In C. Adami, D. M. Bryson, C. Ofria, & R. T. Pennock (Eds.), Artificial Life 13: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (pp. 540–541). MIT Press. BibTeX @inproceedings{taylor2012exploring, author = {Taylor, Tim}, title = {Exploring the Concept of Open-Ended Evolution}, booktitle = {Artificial Life 13: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems}, year = {2012}, editor = {Adami, Christoph and Bryson, David M. and Ofria, Charles and Pennock, Robert T.}, pages = {540--541}, publisher = {{MIT} Press}, category = {conference}, keywords = {oee} } Related publications
  1. Channon, A., Bedau, M., Packard, N., & Taylor, T. (2024). Editorial Introduction to the 2024 Special Issue on Open-Ended Evolution. Artificial Life, 30(3), 300–301. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_e_00445
    Full details
  2. Taylor, T. (2021). Evolutionary Innovation Viewed as Novel Physical Phenomena and Hierarchical Systems Building. Presented at the Fourth Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution (OEE4) at the 2021 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2021). Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09669
    PDF Full details
  3. Taylor, T. (2020). The Importance of Open-Endedness (For the Sake of Open-Endedness). In J. Bongard, J. Lovato, L. Hebert-Dufrésne, R. Dasari, & L. Soros (Eds.), ALIFE 2020: Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2020 (pp. 578–580). https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00257
    PDF Full details
  4. Taylor, T. (2019). Evolutionary Innovations and Where to Find Them: Routes to Open-Ended Evolution in Natural and Artificial Systems. Artificial Life, 25(2), 207–224. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00290
    PDF Full details
  5. Packard, N., Bedau, M., Channon, A., Ikegami, T., Rasmussen, S., Stanley, K., & Taylor, T. (2019). An Overview of Open-Ended Evolution: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution II Special Issue. Artificial Life, 25(2), 93–103. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00291
    PDF Full details
  6. Packard, N., Bedau, M., Channon, A., Ikegami, T., Rasmussen, S., Stanley, K., & Taylor, T. (2019). Open-Ended Evolution and Open-Endedness: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution I Special Issue. Artificial Life, 25(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_e_00282
    PDF Full details
  7. Taylor, T. (2018). Routes to Open-Endedness in Evolutionary Systems. Presented at the Third Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution (OEE3) at the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2018). Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01883v3
    PDF Full details
  8. Taylor, T., Bedau, M., Channon, A., Ackley, D., Banzhaf, W., Beslon, G., … Wiser, M. (2016). Open-Ended Evolution: Perspectives from the OEE Workshop in York. Artificial Life, 22(3), 408–423. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00210
    PDF Full details
  9. Taylor, T. (2015). Requirements for Open-Ended Evolution in Natural and Artificial Systems. Presented at the EvoEvo Workshop at the European Conference on Artificial Life 2015 (ECAL 2015). Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07403
    PDF Full details
  10. Taylor, T. (2014). Evolution in virtual worlds. In M. Grimshaw (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality (pp. 526–548). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199826162.013.044
    PDF Full details
  11. Taylor, T. (2004). Redrawing the Boundary between Organism and Environment. In J. Pollack, M. A. Bedau, P. Husbands, R. A. Watson, & T. Ikegami (Eds.), Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (pp. 268–273). https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1429.003.0045
    PDF Full details
  12. Taylor, T. (2003). Evolving Interaction in Artificial Systems: An historical overview and future directions. In P. McOwan, K. Dautenhahn, & C. L. Nehaniv (Eds.), Abstracts from the Evolvability and Interaction Symposium, held at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, in October 2003. University of Hertfordshire Computer Science Technical Report No. 393.
    Full details
  13. Taylor, T. (2001). Creativity in Evolution: Individuals, Interactions and Environments. In P. J. Bentley & D. W. Corne (Eds.), Creative Evolutionary Systems (pp. 79–108). https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-155860673-9/50037-9
    PDF Full details
  14. Taylor, T. (2000). Some Representational and Ecological Aspects of Evolvability. In C. L. Nehaniv (Ed.), Proceedings of the Evolvability Workshop at the the Seventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Artificial Life 7) (pp. 41–44). Retrieved from http://homepages.herts.ac.uk/ comqcln/al7ev/cnts.html
    PDF Full details
  15. Taylor, T. J. (1999). From Artificial Evolution to Artificial Life (PhD thesis). School of Informatics, College of Science and Engineering, University of Edinburgh.
    PDF Full details
  16. Taylor, T. (1998). Nidus Design Document (Departmental Working Paper No. 269). Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh.
    PDF Full details
« Return to publications list