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Symbiotic Evolution: The SANE System
Active from 1994 - 1997
In this project we developed an Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning method called SANE (Symbiotic, Adaptive Neuro-Evolution) where a population of neurons is evolved to form a neural network for a sequential decision task. Symbiotic evolution promotes both cooperation and specialization in the population, which results in a fast, efficient genetic search and discourages convergence to suboptimal solutions. SANE was shown to be faster and more powerful than other reinforcement learning methods in the pole-balancing and mobile robot benchmark tasks, leading to several novel applications.
Publications
Neuroevolution Insights Into Biological Neural Computation
2025
Risto Miikkulainen,
Science
, Vol. 387 (2025), pp. eadp7478.
Neuroevolution: Harnessing Creativity in AI Model Design
2025
Sebastian Risi, David Ha, Yujin Tang, Risto Miikkulainen, To Appear In , MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2025. MIT Press.
Related Areas
Neuroevolution
Software/Data
JavaSANE
The JavaSANE package contains the source code for the Hierarchical SANE system, based on SANE-C, but rewritten extensive...
1998
SANE-C
The SANE-C package contains the source code for the Hierarchical SANE system, written in C. This package has been rewrit...
1997
Labs
Neural Networks