Black Shoals: Evolving Organisms in a world of Financial Data
Author
Summary
This paper describes the artificial ecosystem designed and built for the Black Shoals Project; a planetarium filled with creatures responding in real time to market activity. Their bodily structure and behaviour evolves through a process of Darwinian selection, from a primaeval soup of uncoordinated components to a complex community of creatures, struggling to compete within an environment driven by Stock Market dynamics. The paper provides details of the implementation of the creatures in Black Shoals.
Full Abstract
In the Black Shoals project, artificial evolution was employed to design articulated creatures which interact with a world of real time financial data. Their phenotypes are composed of multiple interacting elements in a discrete time simulation of Newtonian physics. The couplings formed between evolved, recurrent neural nets and bodily components generate co-ordinated, efficient strategies for the exploitation of their environment. The ecosystem in which they are embedded implements a decentralised evolutionary algorithm, applying competitive selective pressure to the population through conservation of energy. It also couples them to a larger complex system. The opportunities in their world derive from real time stock market information fed from a live Reuters data-feed. The genotype to phenotype mapping employed offers the features of redundancy, neutrality and epistasis. Support is also provided for the ad hoc inclusion of new creature components without modifying the evolutionary algorithm. The focus of this paper is the design and implementation of the ecosystem-based population management, the genetic encoding and developmental process of the creatures.
Paper Download
Other Links
See more on Black Shoals