Publish/subscribe assisted neuroevolution in virtual life game

Simple Event Relaying Framework (SERF) is a software framework that attempts to bring lightweight publish/subscribe architecture inside individual devices and processes. In this paper we study the performance of SERF when it is used as a base for studying a different topic: virtual creatures in a life game learning to seek food via evolutionary algorithms. We measure the time spent on the whole evolution as compared to the time spent on routing events in different network configurations. Results indicate that SERF has small enough overhead to be used even for messaging within the same application while still enabling the benefits of loose coupling.