Building more open-ended evolutionary systems can simultaneously advance our understanding of biology, artificial life, and evolutionary computation. In order to do so, however, we need a way to determine when we are moving closer to this goal. We propose a set of metrics that allow us to measure a system's ability to produce commonly-agreed-upon hallmarks of open-ended evolution: change potential, novelty potential, complexity potential, and ecological potential. Our goal is to make these metrics easy to incorporate into a system, and comparable across systems so that we can make coherent progress as a field. To this end, we provide detailed algorithms (including C++ implementations) for these metrics that should be easy to incorporate into existing artificial life systems. Furthermore, we expect this toolbox to continue to grow as researchers implement these metrics in new languages and as the community reaches consensus about additional hallmarks of open-ended evolution. For example, we would welcome a measurement of a system's potential to produce major transitions in individuality. To confirm that our metrics accurately measure the hallmarks we are interested in, we test them on two very different experimental systems: NK landscapes and the Avida digital evolution platform. We find that our observed results are consistent with our prior knowledge about these systems, suggesting that our proposed metrics are effective and should generalize to other systems.

中文翻译：

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MODES 工具箱：演化系统中开放式动力学的测量

构建更开放的进化系统可以同时推进我们对生物学、人工生命和进化计算的理解。然而，为了做到这一点，我们需要一种方法来确定我们何时离这个目标更近了。我们提出了一组指标，使我们能够衡量系统产生共同商定的开放式进化标志的能力：变化潜力、新颖性潜力、复杂性潜力和生态潜力。我们的目标是使这些指标易于整合到一个系统中，并在系统之间进行比较，以便我们能够在一个领域取得连贯的进展。为此，我们为这些指标提供了详细的算法（包括 C++ 实现），这些算法应该很容易合并到现有的人工生命系统中。此外，随着研究人员以新语言实施这些指标，以及社区就开放式进化的其他标志达成共识，我们预计该工具箱将继续增长。例如，我们欢迎对系统在个性中产生重大转变的潜力进行测量。为了确认我们的指标准确地衡量了我们感兴趣的特征，我们在两个截然不同的实验系统上对其进行了测试：NK 景观和 Avida 数字进化平台。我们发现我们观察到的结果与我们对这些系统的先验知识一致，表明我们提出的指标是有效的，应该推广到其他系统。我们欢迎衡量一个系统在个性中产生重大转变的潜力。为了确认我们的指标准确地衡量了我们感兴趣的特征，我们在两个截然不同的实验系统上对其进行了测试：NK 景观和 Avida 数字进化平台。我们发现我们观察到的结果与我们对这些系统的先验知识一致，表明我们提出的指标是有效的，应该推广到其他系统。我们欢迎衡量一个系统在个性上产生重大转变的潜力。为了确认我们的指标准确地衡量了我们感兴趣的特征，我们在两个截然不同的实验系统上进行了测试：NK 景观和 Avida 数字进化平台。我们发现我们观察到的结果与我们对这些系统的先验知识一致，表明我们提出的指标是有效的，应该推广到其他系统。