ALife in the Galapagos: Migration Effects on Neuro-Controller Design

The parallelization of evolutionary computation tasks using a coarse-grained approach can be efficiently achieved using the island migration model. Strongly influenced by the theory of punctuated equilibria, such a scheme guarantees an efficient exchange of genetic material between niches, not only accelerating but also improving the evolutionary process. We study the island model computational paradigm in relation to the evolutionary robotics methodology. We let populations of robots evolve in different islands of an archipelago and exchange individuals along allowed migration paths. We show, for the test-case selected, how the exchange of genetic material coming from different islands improves the overall design efficiency and speed, effectively taking advantage of a parallel computing environment to improve the methodology of evolutionary robotics, often criticized for its computational cost.