Extinction Events Can Accelerate Evolution
Fig 5
Evolutionary success in the evolutionary robotics model.
The ability of evolution to generate well-adapted solutions is shown for the (a) wheeled robot and (b) biped robot tasks. In the (a) wheeled robot task, a successful robot can navigate the full extent of the maze. In the (b) biped robot task, a successful robot can walk a long distance. Pair-wise comparisons of average performance show that the Control condition never significantly outperforms any of the Extinction conditions, while the Extinction 600 condition significantly outperforms the Control condition in both domains (Mann-Whitney U-test for biped comparisons, Fisher’s exact test for maze comparisons; p < 0.05). Extinction events thus improve the final performance in both tasks.