Artificial Evolution

Question 1

What is a genotype?

Answer 1

The genetic material of an organism; transmitted during reproduction and affected by mutations (CODE)

Question 2

What is a phenotype?

Answer 2

The physical manifestation of the genotype in an organism, giving rise to physical traits (ROBOT, PROGRAM, CIRCUIT)

Question 3

Give the stages of an evolutionary algorithm.

Answer 3

• Devise genetic representation
• Build a population
• Design a fitness function
• Choose selection method
• Choose crossover and mutation
• Choose data analysis method
• Repeat generation cycle until max fitness is found, solution is good enough or there is no further improvement

Question 4

List some applications of evolutionary algorithms.

Answer 4

• Designing the control system for programming humanoid robots to walk
• Stock market predictions
• Building services energy optimisation

Question 5

What are the advantages of artificial evolution?

Answer 5

• No need for teacher or reinforcement learning
• No gradient descent needed so it does not suffer from local minima
• Avoids the need for physical testing
• Generates creative solutions that are not obvious

Question 6

What are the disadvantages of artificial evolution?

Answer 6

Can be hard to interpret the fitness landscape.