Emergence out of interaction: Developing evolutionary technology for design innovation

We consider Class III problems in emergent synthesis methodology. Our aim is to minimize human interaction in coping with problems of incompleteness. We introduce and discuss an agent-based simulation informed from biological evolution. We deal with the problem of persistent species evolution in an artificial evolutionary system and argue that a species evolution process can help addressing design problems, especially design innovation and changing function spaces. Our simulation is based on the theory of ‘fat’ phenotype applied to the dynamic generation of new evolutionary tasks. We present the model and its computational results showing how ‘fat’ phenotypes can yield changing interaction spaces to define new selection forces that recursively give rise to new ‘species’ that solve new selection tasks. We discuss prospects for radical evolutionary technology and for emergent synthesis.