Complex Behavior in Evolutionary Robotics

5 Evolution and the Genotype-Phenotype Mapping

Preamble: Recursion is a powerful principle – frequently applied in mathematics and the natural sciences as well as in very remote fields such as arts and literature. It describes objects or processes that contain one or more similar, often in some sense smaller version(s) of themselves inside of them. In his famous book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”, D. R. Hofstadter calls recursive processes “strange loops” if they occur under non-intuitive circumstances ^[76]. Strange loops, while being somehow mystical and hard to understand, often harbor complex and in various ways valuable properties. The recursive process proposed in this chapter for the purpose of evolving genotype-phenotype ...