Taxonomy in Alife. Measures of Similarity for Complex Artificial Organisms

In this paper a formal approach to construction of a similarity measure for complex creatures is presented. The simulation model is described, and a Framsticks agent is expressed in a formal way. This helps in defining a dissimilarity measure. Two main ideas are discussed with reference to biology, namely genotypic and phenotypic methods. The holistic phenotypic measure is then proposed, where a fast, heuristic algorithm is used. Examples of its application are shown, including mutation and crossing over analysis, and a clustering tree based on distances between pairs of seven artificial individuals.