Elsevier

Biosystems

Volume 76, Issues 1–3, August–October 2004, Pages 177-189
Biosystems

An evolving ontogenetic cellular system for better adaptiveness

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2004.05.020Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper, we present an original cellular system named Phuon. The main motivation behind this project is to go beyond classical cellular systems, such as cellular automata (CA). CA often lack adaptability and turn out to be very brittle in uncertain environment. The idea here is to add ontogeny to cellularity, growth and development being means of adaptation and thus robustness. However, we do not wish to develop yet another cellular system for the sake of it. What we are seeking in the long term is a developmental system for problem solving. This global aim enticed us into finding a way to map a desired global behavior of the system to the local behavior of a cell. Quite naturally a peculiar brand of genetic programming was used for that purpose. The results are still preliminary but in our view they already validate some of the hypotheses behind this work.

Introduction

In this paper, we present an original cellular system named Phuon. The main motivation behind this project is to go beyond classical cellular systems, such as cellular automata. CAs are powerful while remaining conceptually very simple, but they often lack adaptability,2 and are highly prone to synchronization and general failure. The idea here is to add ontogeny to cellularity, growth and development being means of adaptation and thus robustness.

In the first section, we detail the motivations behind the conception of Phuon. We also overview the general principles of the model and relate them to some inspiring works. In 3 A detailed description of the system: the developmental part, 4 The evolutionary engine, we describe the implementation of the system. This is not a technical description as such, though many technical details will be given. This section is rather an explanation of the inner workings of the system, where we discuss the questions surrounding such a system, including synchronization and growth. Finally, Section 5 presents the results obtained to this day with the system. More precisely, we will explain two tasks on which successful solvers were found, and demonstrate their robustness and adaptability qualities (or lack thereof).

The results are still preliminary but in our view they validate some of the hypotheses formulated in Section 2 and open the paths for many future research. The concluding Section 6, will be a discussion of the problems encountered, the limits and the capabilities of the system.

Section snippets

Motivations

Cellular interactions are at the foundation of the complex phenomena of life. Kennedy and Eberhart even argued in their recent book (Kennedy and Eberhart, 2001) that human intelligence and intelligence in general derives from “social” interactions, i.e., from the group. While not going this far, as we have shown (Capcarrere et al., 1996), even the simplest models of interactions, such as Cellular Automata, are capable of generating complex emergent behavior from simplicity. However the

A detailed description of the system: the developmental part

Phuon can be viewed as a two-layer cellular system. A passive environmental layer, and an active cellular layer. We will first present the former briefly and then describe the latter at length. In the second part, we will first explain the cell globally, then its language and its growth, to finally conclude with the question of synchronization.

The evolutionary engine

As exposed earlier, there are two motivations in using evolutionary computation techniques. The first one is practical. It is always very complex, and most often mathematically intractable to devise algorithms for complex systems. The second one is that though the aim here is to develop problem solvers, the questions related to the study of self-organization are also of interest. Evolutionary techniques often propose unexpected means of self-organization. Given the choice that a cell would be

Results

We present here the results obtained with Phuon on two simple tasks: Food foraging and Controlled growth. These results are still preliminary, but they provide a good opportunity to validate some of the hypotheses made about adaptiveness and fault-tolerance in cellular systems.

Concluding remarks

The results presented in this paper are interesting on many respects. However they remain preliminary and do not yet fulfill one of our original motivations: problem solving. We will now recapitulate what we can learn from these, and draw from there some paths for future research.

The food foraging example seems to demonstrate that such a developmental system can provide and even favor good qualities of adaptation: adaptation to a changing environment but also adaptation to faulty functioning.

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Present address: Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NF, UK.

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