A Neuroevolutionary Approach to Emergent Task Decomposition

A scalable architecture to facilitate emergent (self-organized) task decomposition using neural networks and evolutionary algorithms is presented. Various control system architectures are compared for a collective robotics (3 × 3 tiling pattern formation) task where emergent behaviours and effective task -decomposition techniques are necessary to solve the task. We show that bigger, more modular network architectures that exploit emergent task decomposition strategies can evolve faster and outperform comparably smaller non emergent neural networks for this task. Much like biological nervous systems, larger Emergent Task Decomposition Networks appear to evolve faster than comparable smaller networks. Unlike reinforcement learning techniques, only a global fitness function is specified, requiring limited supervision, and self-organized task decomposition is achieved through competition and specialization. The results are derived from computer simulations.