Natural Evolution Speciation for NEAT

The Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm is a popular technique to evolve neural networks. While NEAT has been applied to many problems, such as control systems and game playing, the underlying speciation rules governing NEAT have not been explored. This paper proposes a new speciation technique, called Natural Evolution NEAT (NENEAT), that replaces NEAT's speciation strategy with a new stategy inspired by cladistics. The cladistic formation of species forms a tree of common descent. NENEAT can find smaller network solutions in fewer generation and population member evaluations than NEAT using the same number of children.