Research groups at Kyoto University, Kyushu Institute of Technology, and Shizuoka University have discovered a new, seemingly contradictory rule that when the "complex adaptation system" of living organisms evolves, the properties that assist the system occur prior to the system itself.
The evolution of living organisms is characterized by increasing complexity (the number of components of the biological system and the number of relationships between the elements) over time.Increased complexity is often associated with the environmental adaptability of the biological system, which we call a "complex adaptive system".
A typical example of a complex adaptive system is a colony of social insects represented by ants and bees.The research group tried to verify how a complex adaptive system is realized by using a group robot that imitates the "group foraging through information sharing by swarm robots" seen in ants.
Swarm robots concentrate on the pheromone only by the reaction system to the pheromone, which causes traffic jams and collisions.Therefore, in order to successfully forage, a regulation mechanism called "traffic rules" (priority is given to inbound individuals over outbound individuals) is required.
The research group thought that the hierarchy of such a basic system (using a road sign pheromone) and a regulation system (traffic rules) was involved in the evolution of a complex adaptive system, and the research group made the group robot adaptively evolve like a living thing. Conducted a simulation.Then, I found a surprising mechanism that the evolution of the regulation system precedes the core system.In other words, first of all, a group robot that has only a regulation system evolves, and from among the group robots, a group robot that realizes a complicated adaptation system by also having a core system will appear.
It can be said that this result presents a new theoretical framework for how the "evolution of adaptive complexity" commonly shown by biological systems occurred.
Paper information:[Communications Biology] Regulatory mechanism predates the evolution of self-organizing capacity in simulated ant-like robots
