Lineage and induction in the development of evolved genotypes for non-uniform 2D CAs

Biological development is a stunning mechanism that allows robust generation of complex structures from a linear building plan. This makes it an interesting source of inspiration for solving problems where direct manipulation of a higher-order structure is hard, and the generative building plan can be used as a substitute for indirect manipulation of the unfolded structure. In this paper we propose CA-DEV as a simple computational model for development of rules for non-uniform 2D cellular automata. While being a simplified version of more complex bio-inspired models, CA-DEV incorporates both lineage and induction, and is easily combined with artificial evolution through a binary genotype. We report a number of basic experiments in evolving genotypes for CA-DEV with different settings related to cell division and induction. These experiments show that while the power to introduce diversity is high with most settings, structural properties of developed phenotypes are of a different nature depending on the properties of the development adopted.