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arXiv · 2607.21630

Evolving Self-Organising Agents Without Fitness: Three Falsifiable Experiments from Constraint-Driven Selection to Developmental Encoding

Anushka Sharma
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Abstract

Can evolutionary dynamics characteristic of biological development arise without a designer-specified fitness function? We present Genesis, a platform in which agents inhabit a Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion substrate and evolve under physical constraints alone. Three successive experimental cycles, each testing one falsifiable hypothesis, show: (1) constraint-driven selection sustains evolutionary activity after complete fitness removal but reaches a hard phenotypic complexity ceiling; (2) agent-mediated niche construction via chemical secretion is real but causally insufficient to break that ceiling; and (3) replacing the fixed-alphabet genome with a Compositional Pattern Producing Network (CPPN) indirect encoding, protected by NEAT-style speciation, produces the first evidence of progressive structural complexification in a fitness-free system. Null results are treated as precise, informative answers rather than failures, yielding reusable diagnostic tools and a sham-control protocol applicable to any open-ended evolution evaluation pipeline.

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Anushka Sharma. 2026-07-18. Evolving Self-Organising Agents Without Fitness: Three Falsifiable Experiments from Constraint-Driven Selection to Developmental Encoding. https://doi.org/10.1145/3795101.3814687

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