Digital enzymes

Abstract

Over billions of years, natural selection has continued to select for a framework based on (1) parallelism and (2) cooperation across various levels of organization within organisms to drive their behaviors and responses. We present a design for a bottom-up, reactive controller where the agent's response emerges from many parallelized, enzymatic interactions (bottom-up) within the biologically-inspired process of signal transduction (reactive). We use enzymes to explore the potential for evolving simulated robot controllers for the central-place foraging problem. The properties of the robot and stimuli present in its environment are encoded in a digital format ("molecule") capable of being manipulated and altered through self-contained computational programs ("enzymes") executing in parallel inside each controller to produce the robot's foraging behavior. Evaluation of this design in unbounded worlds reveals evolved strategies employing one or more of the following complex behaviors: (1) swarming, (2) coordinated movement, (3) communication of concepts using a primitive language based on sound and color, (4) cooperation, and (5) division of labor.