Interactive Evolution of Complex Behaviours Through Skill Encapsulation

Human-based computation (HBC) is an emerging research area in which humans and machines collaborate to solve tasks that neither one can solve in isolation. In evolutionary computation, HBC is often realized through interactive evolutionary computation (IEC), in which a user guides evolution by iteratively selecting the parents for the next generation. IEC has shown promise in a variety of different domains, but evolving more complex or hierarchically composed behaviours remains challenging with the traditional IEC approach. To overcome this challenge, this paper combines the recently introduced ESP (encapsulation, syllabus and pandemonium) algorithm with IEC to allow users to intuitively break complex challenges into smaller pieces and preserve, reuse and combine interactively evolved sub-skills. The combination of ESP principles with IEC provides a new way in which human insights can be leveraged in evolutionary computation and, as the results in this paper show, IEC-ESP is able to solve complex control problems that are challenging for a traditional fitness-based approach.