Nature's spectacular inventiveness, reflected in the enormous diversity of form and function displayed by the biosphere, is a feature of life that distinguishes living most strongly from nonliving. It is, therefore, not surprising that this aspect of life should become a central focus of artificial life. We have known since Darwin that the diversity is produced dynamically, through the process of evolution; this has led life's creative productivity to be called Open-Ended Evolution (OEE) in the field. This article introduces the second of two special issues on current research in OEE and provides an overview of the contents of both special issues. Most of the work was presented at a workshop on open-ended evolution that was held as a part of the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life in Tokyo, and much of it had antecedents in two previous workshops on open-ended evolution at artificial life conferences in Cancun and York. We present a simplified categorization of OEE and summarize progress in the field as represented by the articles in this special issue.

The diversity of agent behaviors is an important topic for the quality of video games and virtual environments in general. Offering the most compelling experience for users with different skills is a difficult task, and usually needs important manual human effort for tuning existing code. This can get even harder when dealing with adaptive difficulty systems. Our paper's main purpose is to create a framework that can automatically create behaviors for game agents of different difficulty classes and enough diversity. In parallel with this, a second purpose is to create more automated tests for showing defects in the source code or possible logic exploits with less human effort.

Machine Learning (ML) is proving extremely beneficial in many healthcare applications. In pediatric oncology, retrospective studies that investigate the relationship between treatment and late adverse effects still rely on simple heuristics. To assess the effects of radiation therapy, treatment plans are typically simulated on phantoms, i.e., virtual surrogates of patient anatomy. Currently, phantoms are built according to reasonable, yet simple, human-designed criteria. This often results in a lack of individualization. We present a novel approach that combines imaging and ML to build individualized phantoms automatically. Given the features of a patient treated historically (only 2D radiographs available), and a database of 3D Computed Tomography (CT) imaging with organ segmentations and relative patient features, our approach uses ML to predict how to assemble a patient-specific phantom automatically. Experiments on 60 abdominal CTs of pediatric patients show that our approach constructs significantly more representative phantoms than using current phantom building criteria, in terms of location and shape of the abdomen and of two considered organs, the liver and the spleen. Among several ML algorithms considered, the Gene-pool Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithm for Genetic Programming (GP-GOMEA) is found to deliver the best performing models, which are, moreover, transparent and interpretable mathematical expressions.

Transfer of Temporal Logic Formulas in Reinforcement Learning Zhe Xu and Ufuk Topcu Abstract Transferring high-level knowledge from a source task to a target task is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL). For example, propositional logic and first-order logic have been used as representations of such knowledge. We study the transfer of knowledge between tasks in which the timing of the events matters. We call such tasks temporal tasks . We concretize similarity between temporal tasks through a notion of logical transferability, and develop a transfer learning approach between different yet similar temporal tasks. We first propose an inference technique to extract metric interval temporal logic (MITL) formulas in sequential disjunctive normal form from labeled trajectories collected in RL of the two tasks. If logical transferability is identified through this inference, we construct a timed automaton for each sequential conjunctive subformula of the inferred MITL formulas from both tasks. We perform RL on the extended state which includes the locations and clock valuations of the timed automata for the source task. We then establish mappings between the corresponding components (clocks, locations, etc.) of the timed automata from the two tasks, and transfer the extended Q-functions based on the established mappings. Finally, we perform RL on the extended state for the target task, starting with the transferred extended Q-functions. Our results in two case studies show, depending on how similar the source task and the target task are, that the sampling efficiency for the target task can be improved by up to one order of magnitude by performing RL in the extended state space, and further improved by up to another order of magnitude using the transferred extended Q-functions. 1 Introduction Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in numerous applications.

Evolution and decision-making are not immediately linked in our minds; however, as it turns out, algorithms inspired by biological evolution are the key to augmenting decision-making in a wide variety of business use-cases. But let's start with the problem statement. My team and I are continually engaged in conversations with enterprises from various industries about their expectations for artificial intelligence. Often, we learn they're seeking better ways to model the data that flows through their systems. These questions are all about using AI to produce more insights.

Evolving Order and Chaos: Comparing Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithms for Global Coordination of Cellular Automata Anthony D. Rhodes Portland State University Abstract -- We apply two evolutionary search algorithms: Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to the design of Cellular Automata (CA) that can perform computational tasks requiring global coordination. In particular, we compare search efficiency for PSO and GAs applied to both the density classification problem and to the novel generation of "chaotic" CA. Our work furthermore introduces a new variant of PSO, the Binary Global-Local PSO (BGL-PSO). I. INTRODUCTION: CELLULAR AUTOMATA Cellular Automata (CA) are discrete, spatially-extended dynamical systems consisting of cells, each of which contains a finite state machine. Given an initial configuration of cells, CA evolve over time by performing computations according to local rules.

This paper proposes a new subspace learning method, named Quantized Fisher Discriminant Analysis (QFDA), which makes use of both machine learning and information theory. There is a lack of literature for combination of machine learning and information theory and this paper tries to tackle this gap. QFDA finds a subspace which discriminates the uniformly quantized images in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain at least as well as discrimination of non-quantized images by Fisher Discriminant Analysis (FDA) while the images have been compressed. This helps the user to throw away the original images and keep the compressed images instead without noticeable loss of classification accuracy. We propose a cost function whose minimization can be interpreted as rate-distortion optimization in information theory. We also propose quantized Fisherfaces for facial analysis in QFDA.

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A grouping problem involves partitioning a set of items into mutually disjoint groups or clusters according to some guiding decision criteria and imperative constraints. Grouping problems have many relevant applications and are computationally difficult. In this work, we present a general weight learning based optimization framework for solving grouping problems. The central idea of our approach is to formulate the task of seeking a solution as a real-valued weight matrix learning problem that is solved by first order gradient descent. A practical implementation of this framework is proposed with tensor calculus in order to benefit from parallel computing on GPU devices. To show its potential for tackling difficult problems, we apply the approach to two typical and well-known grouping problems (graph coloring and equitable graph coloring). We present large computational experiments and comparisons on popular benchmarks and report improved best-known results (new upper bounds) for several large graphs.

The computational prediction of superhard materials would enable the in silico design of compounds that could be used in a wide variety of technological applications. Herein, good agreement was found between experimental Vickers hardnesses, Hv, of a wide range of materials and those calculated by three macroscopic hardness models that employ the shear and/or bulk moduli obtained from: (i) first principles via AFLOW-AEL (AFLOW Automatic Elastic Library), and (ii) a machine learning (ML) model trained on materials within the AFLOW repository. Because \(H_{\mathrm{v}} {{\mathrm{ML}}}\) values can be quickly estimated, they can be used in conjunction with an evolutionary search to predict stable, superhard materials. This methodology is implemented in the XtalOpt evolutionary algorithm. Each crystal is minimized to the nearest local minimum, and its Vickers hardness is computed via a linear relationship with the shear modulus discovered by Teter.