David Ackley and Michael Littman. Interactions between learning and
evolution. Artificial life II, 10:487–509, 1991.
Ackley-Littman.pdf (1.2 MB)
A program of research into weakly supervised learning algorithms led us to ask if learning could occur given only natural selection as feedback. We developed an algorithm that combined evolution and learning, and tested it in an artificial environment populated with adaptive and non-adaptive organisms. We found that learning and evolution together were more successful than either alone in producing adaptive populations that survived to the end of our simulation. In a case study testing long-term stability, we simulated one well-adapted population far beyond the original time limit. The story of that population’s success and ultimate demise involves both familiar and novel effects in evolutionary biology and learning algorithms.