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. 

Please direct inquiries to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  (website)

Latest News

9/11/09:  "Evolving Content In the Galactic Arms Race Video Game," by Erin Hastings, Ratan Guha, and Kenneth O. Stanley won the Best Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2009).

7/11/09:  "How Novelty Search Escapes the Deceptive Trap of Learning to Learn," by Sebastian Risi, Sandy D. Vanderbleek, Charles E. Hughes, and Kenneth O. Stanley won the Best Paper Award in the Artificial Life, Evolutionary Robotics, Adaptive Behavior, Evolvable Hardware track at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2009).

7/8/09: Galactic Arms Race is Slashdotted !

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