OMNIREP: originating meaning by coevolving encodings and representations

A major effort in the practice of evolutionary computation goes into deciding how to represent individuals in the evolving population. This task is actually composed of two subtasks: defining a data structure that is the representation and defining the encoding that enables to interpret the representation. In this paper we employ a coevolutionary algorithm—dubbed OMNIREP—to discover both a representation and an encoding that solve a particular problem of interest. We describe four experiments that provide a proof-of-concept of OMNIREP’s essential merit. We think that the proposed methodology holds potential as a problem solver and also as an exploratory medium when scouting for good representations.