Steps Toward a Modular Library for Turning Any Evolutionary Domain into an Online Interactive Platform

Natural evolution inspires the fields of evolutionary compu-tation (EC) and artificial life (ALife). A prominent feature of natural evolution is that it effectively never ends. However, most EC and ALife experiments are only run for several days or weeks at a time. Once an experiment concludes, reproduc-ing, observing, or extending the results often requires consid-erable effort. In contrast, some Collaborative Interactive Evo-lution (CIE) systems, e.g. Picbreeder, were designed to pre-serve results as potential stepping stones to build upon later while taking advantage of human insight to solve challenging problems. Traditionally, building long-running and open ex-periments similar to Picbreeder presents a complex and time-consuming software challenge. To reduce this challenge and thereby remove the barrier to situating almost any experiment within an interactive online framework, this paper presents the initial prototype for Worldwide Infrastructure for Neu-roevolution (WIN). Built in the model of Picbreeder, WIN is a modular library for significantly reducing the complexity of creating fully persistent, online, and interactive evolution-ary platforms for any new or existing domain. WIN Online, the public interface for WIN, provides an online collection of domains built with WIN that lets novice and expert users browse and meaningfully contribute to ongoing experiments. Two example experiments in this paper demonstrate WIN’s potential to quickly bootstrap any evolutionary domain with online and interactive capabilities