Robustness to Faults Promotes Evolvability: Insights from Evolving Digital Circuits

We demonstrate how the need to cope with operational faults enables evolving circuits to find more fit solutions. The analysis of the results obtained in different experimental conditions indicates that, in absence of faults, evolution tends to select circuits that are small and have low phenotypic variability and evolvability. The need to face operation faults, instead, drives evolution toward the selection of larger circuits that are truly robust with respect to genetic variations and that have a greater level of phenotypic variability and evolvability. Overall our results indicate that the need to cope with operation faults leads to the selection of circuits that have a greater probability to generate better circuits as a result of genetic variation with respect to a control condition in which circuits are not subjected to faults.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2016-07-13

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Computer Science, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0158627PMID 27409589PMCID 4943595
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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