Program evolvability under environmental variations and neutrality

Abstract. Biological organisms employ various mechanisms to cope with the dynamic environments they live in. One recent research re-ported that depending on the rates of environmental variation, popu-lations evolve toward genotypes in different regions of the neutral net-works to adapt to the changes. Inspired by that work, we used a genetic programming system to study the evolution of computer programs un-der environmental variation. Similar to biological evolution, the genetic programming populations exploit neutrality to cope with environmen-tal fluctuations and evolve evolvability. We hope this work sheds new light on the design of open-ended evolutionary systems which are able to provide consistent evolvability under variable conditions.