Due to a TA by 1:30pm, July 30. You may work in a group of up to three students, but each individual must be involved in every question. Do not assign problems to individuals within a team! Please submit only one solution per group.
Your solutions must be typed.
For this assignment you will read a research paper entitled ``Evolution of Communication with a Spatialized Genetic Algorithm,'' describing an artificial life experiment run to demonstrate evolutionary mechanisms that can account for communication between animals. This paper is available on the Web at
For this assignment you will read Sections 1 through 4 of the paper and answer a series of questions requiring some analysis of the paper. (I also recommend Sections 5 and 6 of the paper as being quite interesting - I just don't want to require that much reading.)
All of the following questions require relatively short answers (at most seven sentences). But they do require a fairly deep understanding of the selected paper.
The reading describes two general experiments, one in Section 3 and one in Section 4. (Section 3 actually describes three experiments. The first results are graphed Figure 2. The other two were designed to fix a perceived design flaw uncovered in the first; their results are graphed in Figures 3a and 3b.)
In your own words, describe the fundamental differences in animal behavior that distinguish the experiments of Section 3 from the experiment of Section 4. That is, how is the lifetime of an individual animal different? (The reduced number of initial strategies is not a feature of animal behavior.)
The experiment of Section 4 is also different from those of Section 3 in that the initial world of the Section 4 experiment begins with a small random collection of ``Adam and Eve'' strategies. What, in your own words, is the experimenters' purpose for beginning the world in this way?
In presenting the results of Section 4, the paper shows diagrams of the world after a number of generations (Figure 5, page 10). The paper does not give similar diagrams for the first experiment of Section 3, whose results are graphed in Figure 2 (page 6).
As accurately as possible, describe what the world would look like after 600 generations. Figure 2 indicates that the world contains about 70% of animal <1,0,1,1> and 30% of animal <2,0,1,1>, but how would these be distributed in a picture? Justify your answer.