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Is There Another New Factor in Evolution?

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 06:11 authored by Inman HarveyInman Harvey
For 100 years it has been recognised that interactions between learning and evolution, such as the Baldwin effect (Baldwin, 1896), can be subtle and often counter-intuitive. Recently a new effect has been discussed: it is suggested that evolutionary progress towards one specific goal may be assisted by lifetime learning on a different task which may or may not be 'uncorrelated' (parisi, Nolfi & Cecconi, 1992). Here the phenomenon is reproduced in a simple scenario where the tasks are indeed uncorrelated -- 'Another New Factor' does indeed exist. The effect is then explained as being due to recovery from weight-perturbations, caused by mutation, in a neural network. It is a special case of a recently disciovered relearning effect (Harvey & Stone, 1996), the spontaneous recovery of perturbed associations by learning uncorrelated tasks.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Evolutionary Computation

ISSN

10636560

Publisher

MIT Press

Issue

3

Volume

4

Page range

311-327

ISBN

1063-6560

Department affiliated with

  • Informatics Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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