Quality Diversity in the Amorphous Fortress: Evolving for Complexity in 0-Player Games

Published: 28 Oct 2023, Last Modified: 07 Dec 2023ALOE 2023 PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Keywords: Simulation Games, Finite State Machines, Quality Diversity
TL;DR: We use quality diversity optimization to generate diverse sets of 0-player games and attempt to optimize for proxies of complexity.
Abstract: We explore the generation of diverse environments using the Amorphous Fortress (AF) simulation framework. AF defines a set of Finite State Machine (FSM) nodes and edges that can be recombined to control the behavior of agents in the `fortress' grid-world. The behaviors and conditions of the agents within the framework are designed to capture the common building blocks of multi-agent artificial life and reinforcement learning environments. Using quality diversity evolutionary search, we generate diverse sets of environments that exhibit dynamics exhibiting certain types of complexity according to measures of agents' FSM architectures and activations, and collective behaviors. QD-AF generates families of 0-player akin to simplistic ecological models, and we identify the emergence of both competitive and co-operative multi-agent and multi-species survival dynamics. We argue that these generated worlds can collectively serve as training and testing grounds for learning algorithms.
Submission Number: 53
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