Many models were created to capture the commonalities within the
open-ended fitness landscape. For example, it is said that evolution in
biology, technology, and language systems alike, some units (e.g. gene
expression in biology, an invention in technology, or a word in
language) is expressed more frequently than others, which creates a
fat-tailed distribution (Zipf’s law; ref.). Accordingly, Arthur &
Polak (2006), which specifically focused on technological evolution have
found that whenever a key invention is made, this is followed by a rapid
increase in other inventions, which they called the technological
Cambrian explosion. Also, newly improved inventions often rapidly
replace old and less efficient inventions, which they termed gales of
destruction which they referred from the works by Schumpeter (ref.).
Technological evolution has also been studied in area called cultural evolution. For example,
Mesoudi & O’Brien (2008) showed that participants under closed fitness
landscape are able to create better arrow-heads by social learning. In their experiment, participants created virtual arrow-heads that contained several dimensions (length, height, width, etc.). Using a computer program, participants could change the values of each dimension. Results of arrow-heads were given from a mathematical function that weighted each dimension with a normally distributed noise. In each phase, participants could see the results of other participants and were able to copy the arrow-heads if desired. Experimental results showed that participants with social learning outperformed participants that could only rely on individual learning.
The open-endedness of fitness landscape and the combinatorial nature of evolution are under studied especially in technological evolution studies forwarded by cultural evolutionists. This is understandable considering that open-ended fitness landscape being challenging to model, and that many models used in cultural evolution adapt models from biology, which also models evolution as closed fitness landscape. A bridge is needed to fill the gap between models in open-ended and closed fitness landscape.
The simplicity of the models created by the cultural
evolutionists also had many implications which could be interesting to
consider within open-ended fitness landscape. One such instance is the
landmark paper by Henrich (2004). He proposed that increase in
population size affects the up rise and the speed of cumulative cultural
evolution. When each agent of a population loses the cultural trait of
the previous generation by some error distribution, increase in
population size can downfall the effect of this error, and in return,
cumulative culture will occur.
Whether population size will increase the speed of cumulative culture
within open-ended fitness landscape is opened for a debate. However,
considering that there might be a correlation between increase in
population size (ref.) and the speed of technological development
(Moore?) in recent century within the real world, population size might
act as a driver in open-ended fitness landscape. This paper aims to
address this issue using agent-based like simulation.
In the simulation,
agent という言葉を使う意図