Science Corner: Unstuck in Neutral - Emerging Scholars Blog

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#1

Here’s an example of one set of circumstances where neutral evolution enhances creativity in a way that purely adaptive evolution does not.

That post is part of a short series on experiments in simulated evolution that you can try at home, with more planned to come. My hope is that giving folks some “hands-on” experience with evolution might make the topic more approachable. Feel free to share hypotheses and/or results here or in the comments there. And let me know if there are hypotheses you’d like to be able to test going forward.

https://blog.emergingscholars.org/tag/life-finds-a-way-out/

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#2

This is great!

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#3

I’d also be curious if anyone agrees that visualizations like these demonstrate an increase in information via evolution. I think it’s pretty clear, because when the player’s movement is pure random walk (figure 1, top-right and bottom-left quadrants) there’s no way to know where the opponents are, but with evolution the player’s movements reveal information about the opponent locations. But maybe I’m overly generous in my assessment. (The blog post has more details on how these were generated.)

Figure 1

PlayerLocation
PlayerLocation1920×1080 43.8 KB

Figure 2

TaggerZapperNeutralNoNeutralPositionComparison
TaggerZapperNeutralNoNeutralPositionComparison1920×1080 33 KB

#4

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