Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Alastair Channon's Outputs (26)

A Procedure for Testing for Tokyo Type 1 Open-Ended Evolution. (2024)
Journal Article
Channon, A. (in press). A Procedure for Testing for Tokyo Type 1 Open-Ended Evolution. Artificial Life, 30(3), 345-355. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00430

Tokyo Type 1 open-ended evolution (OEE) is a category of OEE that includes systems exhibiting the ongoing generation of adaptive novelty and ongoing growth in complexity. It can be considered as a necessary foundation for Tokyo Type 2 OEE (ongoing ev... Read More about A Procedure for Testing for Tokyo Type 1 Open-Ended Evolution..

The effect of social information use without learning on the evolution of social behavior (2021)
Journal Article
Channon, A., & Borg, J. M. (in press). The effect of social information use without learning on the evolution of social behavior. Artificial Life, 26(4), https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00328

In a recent paper by Borg (2017) it was shown that social information alone, decoupled from any within-lifetime learning, can result in improved performance on a food foraging task compared to when social information is unavailable. Here we assess wh... Read More about The effect of social information use without learning on the evolution of social behavior.

The Effect of Social Information Use without Learning on the Evolution of Behaviour (2021)
Journal Article
Channon. (2021). The Effect of Social Information Use without Learning on the Evolution of Behaviour. Artificial Life, 431-454. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00328

In a recent paper by Borg & Channon [6] it was shown that social information alone, decoupled from any within-lifetime learning, can result in improved performance on a food foraging task compared to when so13 cial information is unavailable. Here we... Read More about The Effect of Social Information Use without Learning on the Evolution of Behaviour.

A Simple 3D-Only Evolutionary Bipedal System with Albatross Morphology for Increased Performance (2020)
Journal Article
Channon. (2020). A Simple 3D-Only Evolutionary Bipedal System with Albatross Morphology for Increased Performance. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 125-132. https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308500

Bipedal walking is a difficult behaviour to encode into an evolutionary neural network, particularly in three-dimensional environments. Agents must be constantly maintaining balance alongside their primary objectives. Here we re-implement a simple ev... Read More about A Simple 3D-Only Evolutionary Bipedal System with Albatross Morphology for Increased Performance.

The Use of Technology in the Subcategorisation of Osteoarthritis: a Delphi Study Approach (2020)
Journal Article
Mennan, C., Hopkins, T., Channon, A., Elliott, M., Johnstone, B., Kadir, T., …Roberts, S. (2020). The Use of Technology in the Subcategorisation of Osteoarthritis: a Delphi Study Approach. Osteoarthritis and Cartilage, 2(3), Article 100081. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocarto.2020.100081

Objective This UK-wide OATech+ Network consensus study utilised a Delphi approach to discern levels of awareness across an expert panel regarding the role of existing and novel technologies in osteoarthritis research. To direct future cross-disciplin... Read More about The Use of Technology in the Subcategorisation of Osteoarthritis: a Delphi Study Approach.

Neuroevolution of Humanoids that Walk Further and Faster with Robust Gaits (2019)
Journal Article
Channon. (2019). Neuroevolution of Humanoids that Walk Further and Faster with Robust Gaits. Artificial Life, 543 - 550. https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00219

Bipedal locomotion requires precise rhythm and balance. Here we demonstrate two fitness-function enhancements applied to OpenAI?s 3D Humanoid-v1 walking task using a replica of Salimans et al.?s evolution strategy (Salimans et al., 2017). The first e... Read More about Neuroevolution of Humanoids that Walk Further and Faster with Robust Gaits.

An Overview of Open-Ended Evolution: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution II Special Issue. (2019)
Journal Article
Channon. (2019). An Overview of Open-Ended Evolution: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution II Special Issue. Artificial Life, 93 - 103. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00291

Nature's spectacular inventiveness, reflected in the enormous diversity of form and function displayed by the biosphere, is a feature of life that distinguishes living most strongly from nonliving. It is, therefore, not surprising that this aspect of... Read More about An Overview of Open-Ended Evolution: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution II Special Issue..

Maximum Individual Complexity is Indefinitely Scalable in Geb (2019)
Journal Article
Channon. (2019). Maximum Individual Complexity is Indefinitely Scalable in Geb. Artificial Life, 134-144. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00285

Geb was the first artificial life system to be classified as exhibiting open-ended evolutionary dynamics according to Bedau and Packard’s evolutionary activity measures and is the only one to have been classified as such according to the enhanced ver... Read More about Maximum Individual Complexity is Indefinitely Scalable in Geb.

Maximum Individual Complexity is Indefinitely Scalable in Geb (2019)
Journal Article
Channon. (2019). Maximum Individual Complexity is Indefinitely Scalable in Geb. Artificial Life, 134-144. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00285

Geb was the first artificial life system to be classified as exhibiting open-ended evolutionary dynamics according to Bedau and Packard’s evolutionary activity measures and is the only one to have been classified as such according to the enhanced ve... Read More about Maximum Individual Complexity is Indefinitely Scalable in Geb.

Open-Ended Evolution and Open-Endedness: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution I Special Issue. (2019)
Journal Article
Channon. (2019). Open-Ended Evolution and Open-Endedness: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution I Special Issue. Artificial Life, 1 - 3. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_e_00282

Nature's spectacular inventiveness, reflected in the enormous diversity of form and function displayed by the biosphere, is a feature of life that distinguishes living most strongly from nonliving. It is, therefore, not surprising that this aspect of... Read More about Open-Ended Evolution and Open-Endedness: Editorial Introduction to the Open-Ended Evolution I Special Issue..

Opposing effects of final population density and stress on Escherichia coli mutation rate (2018)
Journal Article
Channon. (2018). Opposing effects of final population density and stress on Escherichia coli mutation rate. ISME Journal, 2981-2987. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-018-0237-3

Evolution depends on mutations. For an individual genotype, the rate at which mutations arise is known to increase with various stressors (stress-induced mutagenesis-SIM) and decrease at high final population density (density-associated mutation-rate... Read More about Opposing effects of final population density and stress on Escherichia coli mutation rate.

Environmental pleiotropy and demographic history direct adaptation under antibiotic selection (2018)
Journal Article
Channon. (2018). Environmental pleiotropy and demographic history direct adaptation under antibiotic selection. Heredity, 438-448. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-018-0137-3

Evolutionary rescue following environmental change requires mutations permitting population growth in the new environment. If change is severe enough to prevent most of the population reproducing, rescue becomes reliant on mutations already present.... Read More about Environmental pleiotropy and demographic history direct adaptation under antibiotic selection.

Evolving Robust, Deliberate Motion Planning With a Shallow Convolutional Neural Network (2018)
Journal Article
Channon. (2018). Evolving Robust, Deliberate Motion Planning With a Shallow Convolutional Neural Network. https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00099

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have seen great success on machine learning tasks in recent years but have shown difficulty with tasks that require long-term deliberative planning. Whereas, purpose-built hybrid network architectures hav... Read More about Evolving Robust, Deliberate Motion Planning With a Shallow Convolutional Neural Network.

Critical Mutation Rate has an Exponential Dependence on Population Size for Eukaryotic-length Genomes with Crossover (2017)
Journal Article
Channon. (2017). Critical Mutation Rate has an Exponential Dependence on Population Size for Eukaryotic-length Genomes with Crossover. Scientific reports, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-14628-x

The critical mutation rate (CMR) determines the shift between survival-of-the-fittest and survival of individuals with greater mutational robustness (“flattest”). We identify an inverse relationship between CMR and sequence length in an in silico sys... Read More about Critical Mutation Rate has an Exponential Dependence on Population Size for Eukaryotic-length Genomes with Crossover.

Spontaneous mutation rate is a plastic trait associated with population density across domains of life. (2017)
Journal Article
Aston, E., McBain, A., Knight, C., Krašovec, R., Richards, H., Hatcher, C., …Gifford, D. (2017). Spontaneous mutation rate is a plastic trait associated with population density across domains of life. PLoS Biology, e2002731 - ?. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002731

Rates of random, spontaneous mutation can vary plastically, dependent upon the environment. Such plasticity affects evolutionary trajectories and may be adaptive. We recently identified an inverse plastic association between mutation rate and populat... Read More about Spontaneous mutation rate is a plastic trait associated with population density across domains of life..

Open-Ended Evolution: Perspectives from the OEE1 Workshop in York (2016)
Journal Article
Channon. (2016). Open-Ended Evolution: Perspectives from the OEE1 Workshop in York. Artificial Life, 408-423. https://doi.org/10.1162/ARTL_a_00210

We describe the content and outcomes of the First Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution: Recent Progress and Future Milestones (OEE1), held during the ECAL 2015 conference at the University of York, UK, in July 2015. We briefly summarize the content of th... Read More about Open-Ended Evolution: Perspectives from the OEE1 Workshop in York.

Monotonicity of fitness landscapes and mutation rate control (2016)
Journal Article
Channon. (2016). Monotonicity of fitness landscapes and mutation rate control. Journal of Mathematical Biology, 1491-1524. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-016-0995-3

A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the performance of... Read More about Monotonicity of fitness landscapes and mutation rate control.

Where antibiotic resistance mutations meet quorum-sensing (2014)
Journal Article
Channon. (2014). Where antibiotic resistance mutations meet quorum-sensing. Microbial Cell, 250 - 252. https://doi.org/10.15698/mic2014.07.158

We do not need to rehearse the grim story of the global rise of antibiotic resistant microbes. But what if it were possible to control the rate with which antibiotic resistance evolves by de novo mutation? It seems that some bacteria may already do e... Read More about Where antibiotic resistance mutations meet quorum-sensing.

Mutation rate plasticity in rifampicin resistance depends on Escherichia coli cell-cell interactions (2014)
Journal Article
Channon, A. (2014). Mutation rate plasticity in rifampicin resistance depends on Escherichia coli cell-cell interactions. Nature communications, 3742 -?. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms4742

Variation of mutation rate at a particular site in a particular genotype, in other words mutation rate plasticity (MRP), can be caused by stress or ageing. However, mutation rate control by other factors is less well characterized. Here we show that... Read More about Mutation rate plasticity in rifampicin resistance depends on Escherichia coli cell-cell interactions.