Banzhaf, Wolfgang, Bert Baumgaertner, Guillaume Beslon, René Doursat, James A. Foster, Barry McMullin, Vinicius Veloso De Melo et al. “Defining and simulating open-ended novelty: requirements, guidelines, and challenges.” Theory in Biosciences 135, no. 3 (2016): 131-161.
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The open-endedness of a system is often defined as a continual production of novelty. Here we pin down this concept more fully by defining several types of novelty that a system may exhibit, classified as variation, innovation, and emergence. We then provide a meta-model for including levels of structure in a system’s model. From there, we define an architecture suitable for building simulations of open-ended novelty-generating systems and discuss how previously proposed systems fit into this framework. We discuss the design principles applicable to those systems and close with some challenges for the community.