Section: New Results

Open-Ended Novelty: Requirements, Guidelines, and Challenges

Participants: G. Beslon

We started in 2014 a collective reflexion on the concept of "Open-Endedness". This reflexion led to a collective paper published this year in "Theory in Biosciences" [12]. The open-endedness of a system is often defined as a continual production of novelty. In this paper we pin down this concept more fully by defining several types of novelty that a system may exhibit, classified as variation, innovation, and emergence. We then provide a meta-model for including levels of structure in a system's model. From there, we define an architecture suitable for building simulations of open-ended novelty-generating systems and discuss how previously proposed systems fit into this framework. We discuss the design principles applicable to those systems and close with some challenges for the community.