Weight Agnostic Neural Networks

Have you ever wondered how most mammals are capable of fairly complex tasks, like walking, straight after being born? They haven't had time to experience the world yet so they've clearly not learnt how to perform the actions. Their brains must be pre-wired to enable them to walk, but if the brain structure relies on specific weights then an individual learning from its experiences could lose the ability to act shortly after birth, or never have the ability to begin with. Inspired by this, Adam Gaier and David Ha introduced the world to Weight Agnostic Neural Networks (WANN), an evolutionary strategy for developing neural networks which can perform a task independent of the weights of the connections. In this post, we'll briefly look into Weight Agnostic Neural Networks and use a code implementation to train our very own WANNs on the Lunar Lander gym environment.