Symbiosis: Using Predator-Prey Games as a Test Bed for Studying Competitive Co-evolution

The animal approach constitutes an intriguing attempt to study and comprehend the behavior of adaptive, learning entities in complex environments. Further inspired by the notions of co-evolution and evolutionary \´\´arms races", we have developed Symbiosis, a virtual ecosystem that hosts two self-organizing, combating species - preys and predators. All animats live and evolve in this shared environment, they are self-maintaining and engage in a series of vital activities - nutrition, growth, communication - with the ultimate goals of survival and reproduction. The main objective of Symbiosis is to study the behavior of ecosystem members, especially in terms of the emergent learning mechanisms and the effect of co-evolution on the evolved behavioral strategies. In this direction, several indicators are used to assess individual behavior, with the overall effectiveness metric depending strongly on the animats net energy gain and reproduction rate. Several experiments have been conducted with the developed simulator under various environmental conditions. Overall experimental results support our original hypothesis that co-evolution is a driving factor in the animat learning procedure