Welcome to the Evolutionary Complexity (EPlex) Research Group at the University of Central Florida.  Our research focuses on abstracting the essential properties of natural evolution that made it possible to discover astronomically complex structures such as the human brain.  If such properties can be abstracted into computer algorithms, then they can be leveraged to automate the discovery of large-scale neural networks (which is called neuroevolution), robot morphologies, building and vehicle architectures, art, and music. 

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Latest News

6/2/09: EPlex releases Galactic Arms Race , the first multiplayer online game in which content evolves to satisfy its users.

4/19/09: EPlex unveils the HyperNEAT Users Page, a one-stop location for information and resources on HyperNEAT from across the internet.    

4/10/09: "How Novelty Search Escapes the Deceptive Trap of Learning to Learn," by Sebastian Risi, Sandy D. Vanderbleek, Charles E. Hughes and Kenneth O. Stanley was nominated for the Best Paper Award in the Artificial Life, Evolutionary Robotics, Adaptive Behavior, Evolvable Hardware track at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2009).

We aim to reproduce through artificial means the process of continual elaboration of form seen in natural evolution.