Taylor, Tim. “Exploring the concept of open-ended evolution.” In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on artificial life , pp. 540-541. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
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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.