Emergent behaviour in co-evolutionary design

An important aspect of creative design is the concept of emergence. Though emergence is important, its mechanism is either not well understood or it is limited to the domain of shapes. This deficiency can be compensated by considering definitions of emergent behaviour from the Artificial Life (ALife) research community. With these new insights, it is proposed that a computational technique, called evolving representations of design genes, can be extended to emergent behaviour. We demonstrate emergent behaviour in a co-evolutionary model of design. This co-evolutionary approach to design allows a solution space (structure space) to evolve in response to a problem space (behaviour space). Since the behaviour space is now an active participant, behaviour may emerge with new structures at the end of the design process. This paper hypothesizes that emergent behaviour can be identified using the same technique. The floor plan example of Gero and Schnier (1995) is extended to demonstrate how behaviour can emerge in a co-evolutionary design process.