Bedau, Mark A., Shareen Joshi, and Benjamin Lillie. “Visualizing waves of evolutionary activity of alleles.” In Proceedings of the 1999 GECCO Workshop on Evolutionary Computation Visualization , pp. 96-98. 1999.
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We illustrate a method for visualizing adaptive evo-lutionary phenomena in evolving systems [3]. The method was originally illustrated very brie y and ab-stractly at the level of alleles [3], and it has sub-sequently been applied in great detail at the level of whole genotypes [2]. Here we apply the method in some signi cant detail to alleles in three di erent evolving systems: a model of the evolution of sensory-motor strategies, a model of traders buying and selling securities in a nancial market using an evolving set of market-forecasting rules, and an analogue of the-nancial market model in which natural selection is re-placed by random selection. The underlying hypoth-esis behind the visualization method is that \activity wave diagrams" highlight the quality of the main adap-tive events and adaptive phenomena in an evolving system. This abstract contains wave diagrams show-ing a variety of evolutionary phenomena such as com-petetive exclusion, cooperation, and frozen accidents. The evolutionary activity statistic we visualize are computed from data obtained by observing an evolving system. (More details are available elsewhere [3, 4, 2]. ) We view an evolving system as a population of compo-nents participating in a cycle of birth, life and death, with each component largely determined by inherited traits. Birth and mutation introduce innovations into the population. Adaptive innovations persist in the population because of their bene cial e ects for com-ponent survival or reproduction, and non-adaptive in-novations either disappear or persist passively. Our purpose for using the evolutionary activity statistic is to identify innovations that persist and continue to be signi cant. Counters are attached to compo-nents for bookkeeping purposes, to update each com-ponent’s current activity as the component persists. If the components are passed along during reproduc-tion, the corresponding counters are inherited with the components, maintaining an increasing activity count for an entire lineage.