Learning to select mates in artificial life.

Artificial life (A-life) simulations present a natural way to study interesting phenomena emerging in a population of evolving agents. In this paper, we investigate whether allowing A-life agents to select mates can extend the lifetime of a population. In our approach, each agent evaluates potential mates via a preference function. The role of this function is to map information about an agent and its candidate mate to a scalar preference for deciding whether or not to form an offspring. We encode the parameters of the preference function genetically within each agent, thus allowing such preferences to be agent-specific as well as evolving over time. We evaluate this approach in a simple predator-prey A-life environment and demonstrate that the ability to evolve a per-agent mate-selection preference function indeed significantly increases the extinction time of the population. Additionally an inspection of the evolved preference function parameters shows that agents evolve to favor mates who have survival traits.