Niching Improves Evolved Agents in The Core

Summary

The paper studies niching in The Core, a competitive co-evolution algorithm that develops autonomous agent control without using a traditional fitness function. Agents evolve through local interactions, tournament selection, crossover, and mutation, with offspring controllers produced through the evolutionary process. Earlier work had shown that The Core could evolve agents for combat and navigation in the Xpilot video game. This study narrows evolution to specific subsets of the original environment and compares those niched agents with agents evolved across the entire system and with agents assigned to different sub-environments. The reported results show that agents niched to a particular subset achieve greater success than both comparison groups, extending evidence for environment-specific specialization in The Core.