The Core: Evolving Autonomous Agent Control

The Core is a unique learning environment where agents compete to evolve controllers without the need of a fitness function. In this paper we use it with a cyclic genetic algorithm to evolve agents in the network game Xpilot, where the agents are engaged in space combat. The agents interact locally through tournament selection, crossover, and mutation to produce offspring in the evolution of controllers. The system is highly parallel, can be easily distributed among a network of computers, and has an element of simple co-evolution as the environment (population of agents) evolves to continually challenge individual agents evolving in the environment