Necrotic Control of the Aesthetics of Evolved Art

This study uses necrosis, a technique from the domain of artificial immune systems, to control the evolution of apoptotic cellular automata. These automata generate complex images that require a very small amount of initial data. The genes that yield these images are embedded in an extremely complex adaptive landscape. The process of controlling the type of images located by applying necrosis is found to be a simple and efficient technique, in comparison to writing more complex fitness functions for the original evolutionary computation system. Two kinds of necrosis are tested, a soft shape based system and a crisp entropy based system. Both sorts of necrosis are found to be able to steer evolution effectively, with the shape based necrosis working well, and the entropy based necrosis having some problems when more extreme forms of necrosis driven filtration are employed. Possible generalizations to steering other evolutionary optimization tasks are outlined.