The hierarchical modular structures are an essential part of the complex biological organisms and play an indispensable role in their evolution. The modularity enhances the evolvability, allowing the recombination of various modules during the evolution process. The evolved hierarchy of modular components bootstraps the evolution process, allowing operations over a collection of complex structures rather than basic genes. After that, the neuroevolutionary process does not need to spend time to evolve similar functionality from scratch again. Instead, the ready-to-use modular components can be used as building blocks to produce very complex neural networks.
In this chapter, we will implement a solution to the retina problem using the ES-HyperNEAT algorithm. The retina problem is about the simultaneous identification of valid 2x2 patterns on the left...