| Abstract |
Evolution is one of the major omnipresent
powers in the universe that has been studied for about two
centuries. Recent scientific and technical developments
make it possible to make the transition from passively
understanding to actively using evolutionary processes.
Today this is possible in Evolutionary Computing, where
human experimenters can design and manipulate all com-
ponents of evolutionary processes in digital spaces. We
argue that in the near future it will be possible to imple-
ment artificial evolutionary processes outside such imagi-
nary spaces and make them physically embodied. In other
words, we envision the ‘‘Evolution of Things’’, rather than
just the evolution of digital objects, leading to a new field
of Embodied Artificial Evolution (EAE). The main objec-
tive of this paper is to present a unifying vision in order to
aid the development of this high potential research area. To
this end, we introduce the notion of EAE, discuss a few
examples and applications, and elaborate on the expected
benefits as well as the grand challenges this developing
field will have to address.
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