Goals of the ANNEvolve project:

The long term goal is to advance our level of understanding about simulated evolution as a means to configure and optimize Artificial Neural Nets (ANNs). The medium term goal is to apply our methods to a series of interesting problems.

A secondary goal is educational in nature. We attempt to write our software with ample explanation, not just for the user, but for the engineer/programmer/scientist who wants to understand the innermost detail. All of the source code is freely available to anyone to use without restriction. (But we do appreciate that you give credit where credit is due.)

Recently, our activity has been focused on the problem of sailboat control and guidance. We have a mathematical model of sailboat physics, and a population of ANNs. The ANN output sets the sails and steers the rudder of a virtual boat. The population has learned, through evolution, to circumnavigate an island. A typical path is shown:

We are also working on a method whereby concurrent programs can exchange chromosomes over the internet, thereby simulating migration of organisms between habitats. We have shown that this allows the total population to evolve for a longer time before genetic diversity disappears, resulting in superior solutions to difficult optimization problems.

A recent area of exploration is the capability of an ANN to act as a general purpose computer, performing an activity that uses both active memory and computational logic. This type of activity is normally performed by procedural computer programs. In theory, an ANN with recurrency is also capable of this. Our most recent release, the 4play package, demonstrates that it is true in practice as well as theory.

If you find this interesting, feel free to join our mailing list, or to look through the mailing list archives.

If you would like to write software (or collaborate) and have it made available here, take a look our TO DO List. If you are working on an idea of your own that is related to neuroevolution, and if you would like it to be made available here, let us know about it.