)
selection [3].
However, natural selection is not the only instance of selection in
Nature, paradoxically as it might seem. Evolution happens also in
economy and the markets, with firms evolving, feeding from each other,
occupying economical niches, as has been described by, for
instance, Brian Arthur [5] and John Holland himself [6]. There is also
a theory on evolving inflationary universes [7], in which universes with
different physical laws compete with each other, with some of them
beating the others and filling all possible space. Finally, ideas
evolve, in what has been called memetic evolution [8],
competing for brain space, reproducing and mutating; an idea can
be a pop tune, an e-mail chain letter, or a TV program like Seinfeld.
In all these instances of evolution, it would be hard to think of
substrates (what is the DNA of an idea?), but there are many others
common traits that make us think of them all as evolution.
In this paper, we will present EO, a new evolutionary computation framework, and its implementation as the EO evolutionary computation library, which tries to mimic evolution in general, by abstracting the common features of all these instances of evolution.
The paper is organized as follows: in the next section (section 2), we will enumerate the conditions necessary for an object to evolve; then, we will show how to evolve objects in practice in section 3. Finally, in section 4 we will present the EO evolutionary computation C++ class library, and some examples in which EO (the framework) and EO (the library) have been put to practice. Finally, we will discuss the implications of EO and future lines of work.