An evo-devo approach to architectural design

Richards, Daniel and Dunn, Nick and Amos, Martyn (2012) An evo-devo approach to architectural design. In: GECCO '12 : Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. ACM Press, New York, USA, pp. 569-576. ISBN 9781450311779

Abstract

We present a developmental genotype-phenotype growth process, or embryogeny, which is used to evolve, in silico, efficient three-dimensional structures that exhibit real-world architectural performance. The embryogeny defines a sequential assembly of architectural components within a three-dimensional volume, and indirectly establishes a regulatory network of components based on the principles of gene regulation. The implicitly regulated phenotypes suggest advances for the automatic design of physical structures, by improving scalability of the genotype encoding and embedding real-world constraints. We demonstrate that our model can evolve novel, yet efficient, architectural structures that exhibit emergent shape, topology and material distribution. Finally, we compare evolved structures against a "hand-coded" solution to illustrate that our model produces competitive results without prior knowledge of the design solution or direct human guidance.