Co-evolution and emergence in design

Evolution as a metaphor borrowed from nature can be used to describe a design process. However, this has generally been applied to the evolution of a solution which assumes the problem does not change throughout the process. This is a naive assumption in design because the problem indeed changes. This paper considers the evolution of both the problem and solution and introduces coevolutionary design. This paper proposes two approaches to implementing coevolutionary design and also addresses the related issues of evaluation and termination in a computational model. Finally, the paper considers how a coevolutionary system can generate and recognize emergent structure and behaviour. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Limited.