A Study of the Coevolution of Digital Organisms with an Evolutionary Cellular Automaton

Abstract

This paper presents an Evolutionary Cellular Automaton (ECA) that simulates the evolutionary dynamics of biological interactions by manipulating strategies of dispersion and associations between digital organisms. The parameterization of the different types of interaction and distribution strategies using configuration files generates easily interpretable results. In that respect, ECA is an effective instrument for measuring the effects of relative adaptive advantages and a good resource for studying natural selection. Although ECA works effectively in obtaining the expected results from most well-known biological interactions, some unexpected effects were observed. For example, organisms uniformly distributed in fragmented habitats do not favor eusociality, and mutualism evolved from parasitism simply by varying phenotypic flexibility. Finally, we have verified that natural selection represents a cost for the emergence of sex by destabilizing the stable evolutionary strategy of the 1:1 sex ratio after generating randomly different distributions in each generation.

Aggregated Distribution as an Explanation for the Paradox of Plankton and Collective Animal Behavior

“…ECA stands for Evolutionary Cellular Automaton [ 19 ]. ECA starts from a data set obtained from natural observations or lab experiments indicated in each case or introduced by the user without reference to empirical studies.…”

“…Terminology and concepts involving ECAs are provided in detail in [ 19 ]; notwithstanding, we focus on some of the most relevant terms related to dispersion. First of all, the habitat variables that define the selective pressure: NumberOfCells: number of cells in which the habitat is divided.…”