Evolving spaceship designs for optimal control and the emergence of interesting behaviour

This paper investigates the evolution of spaceship designs given three different fitness functions: one based on specified design objectives, and two simulation-based measures that assess how well a simple controller is able to steer the ships over a number of courses. We use a simple but well-grounded physics model which accounts for the mass of the components and their moments of inertia: the position of thrusters impacts on the linear and angular acceleration that the ship is capable of. We show that evolution is able to generate effective ship designs in this space and that the simple controller generates some interesting behaviours. The evolved ships could be used as a source of diverse alien ships in 2D arcade-style video games. © 2012 IEEE.