Comparative study of effects of fitness landscape changes in open-ended evolutionary simulations and in genetic programming

Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution by natural selection in [Darwin and Wallace, 1858], and since that time the concept has remained unchanged at the highest level. However, there have been numerous and animated debates about its concrete implementation. Evolutionary Computation (EC) has taken inspiration from these debates, for example recently by reusing ideas from epigenetics [Tanev and Yuta, 2003]. We propose here to focus on a point which, although not central to the theory itself, comes up regularly in the polemics that have marked the eld of evolutionary biology: environmental uctuations. That is to say events uctuating randomly or regularly and modifying the optimal strategy maximizing an individual's tness. This thesis studies the e ects of environmental uctuations on natural selection in the context of computer simulations such as Genetic Programming (GP) and \open-ended" arti cial life simulations. The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows: Section 1.1 describes the motivation behind this research; Section 1.2 presents the research questions and the objectives addressed in the thesis; then Section 1.3 lists the contributions; nally Section 1.4 presents the structure of the thesis.