Evolving Neural Networks for Artificial Intelligence

This article takes a brief look at the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) to situated and embodied AI (SEAI) and its relationship to cognitive incrementalism, wherein sensorimotor mechanisms form the basis for high-level cognition. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) designed and tuned by evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are discussed in terms of their potential contributions to SEAI. Though state-of-the-art evolutionary ANN (EANN) research has not fulfilled this promise, our script-based EANN system (SEVANN) is briefly introduced as a software tool for quickly testing the SEAI utility of neurocomputational models of various spatial and temporal granularities.