Success and Failure in Adaptation

1. Dr Anne-Marie Grisogono Research Leader Land Systems Land Operations Division, DSTO Success and Failure in Adaptation

2. Scope and Objectives • Interested in systems that adapt • Including natural (living) and ‘engineered’ systems – and also hybrid sociotechnical systems • both individual systems and populations of systems • Open systems that exist in and interact with a context (physical environment + other systems) through porous boundaries Iterative process: fitness variation interaction feedback fitness- …linked …selection • Understand and exploit the power of adaptation • to generate useful new characteristics (design), • to solve complex problems, • to develop comparative advantage over competing systems • to develop effective cooperative strategies between systems • To do this - need to understand • how adaptation works, and • how and why it succeeds or fails. distinguish success/failure of mechanism of adaptation from needed successes and failures within adaptation

3. How Does a Living System Make a Living? import resources to function and reproduce, and… fight decay through homeostasis, self- repair and exporting waste Complexity and adaptation are inextricably linked Emergence of complex structure through adaptation is elicited by problems posed by context Success in making a living depends on properties of context AND system(sense, process, act, adapt) ? How hard is this? Improves ability to deal with challenges depends on what problems system has to solve to find resources and protect itself from danger i.e. on system AND context Increases adaptation complexity System’s ability to adapt Makes life harder for others Requires, stimulates and enables adaptation Complexity of context Complexity of context (from the system’s POV) System’s ability to sense, process & act on its own behalf fitness

4. For populations of systems: Factors of Success speed of ‘moving’ in fitness landscape to get off regions of declining fitness and find new suitable regions as they emerge ability to stabilise, protect useful properties ability to modify environment to maintain or increase habitability locally to current population, and foster emergence of habitable regions elsewhere Factors of Failure loss of agility in design space, eg by overspecialisation, reduced diversity loss of useful information – leading to ‘mutational meltdown’ propensity to act on the environment in such a way as to decrease habitability either locally, or elsewhere Factors for Success or Failure of Adaptation For individual systems: Factors of Success • speed of ‘moving’ in own fitness landscape, replacing capabilities of lower or declining fitness with new ones better suited to creating success in context, • ability to stabilise, protect useful properties • ability to modify environment to maintain or increase habitability locally, or foster emergence of habitable regions elsewhere Factors of Failure • loss of agility eg by overspecialisation, getting set in its ways • loss of useful information – forgetting what it has learnt • acting in ways that decrease habitability locally, or elsewhere, eg by prioritising short-term gains over longer-term consequences

5. How to Study and Quantify these Factors and what Influences them?

6. Conceptual Framework for Adaptation A lot of parameters!! How it’s evaluated What gets tried How it’s retained or discarded • Generic model of adaptation • Measures of success and failure • Types of adaptive mechanisms • Four Classes of adaptation • Five Levels of adaptation • Scale of adaptive mechanisms • Health of adaptive mechanisms • Factors that influence effectiveness what adaptation is what steers it implementation strategies what it deals with what aspect of the system is adapting where it is applied what it takes to make them work what it takes to improve them Variation, Interaction, Feedback, Selection MoS, MoF, proxies, indicators, correlations Population size, cycle time, randomness, parallelism stressor parameters, effects and time scales Adaptability of system and adaptation parameters System parameters, sense, process and act scales Continuity, throughput, alignment, drive Other parameters that characterise adaptation mechanism See references in text

7. (Some of) What Influences Success or Failure of Adaptation Topology of fitness space Ability to find and exploit opportunities and recognise & deal with threats types of change of context Rate of change of context Ability to modify the environment to increase habitability Time constant of context Ability to protect the good regions of design space already populated Ability to move in fitness space Ability to specialise but retain agility Time constant of adaptive cycle How well system stabilises important parts of genome How well system produces new options How well selection works what aspects are variable How well system evaluates new options Genotype – phenotype map Accessible region of phenospace rate of variation How strict or tolerant selection is How accurate evaluation is random or directed extent of variation – size of excursions produced? size of population Correlation with real fitness Modularity of map to produce higher order structure, existence of variable system parameters that create the possibility for enduring relationships between systems How fast evaluation is depth, scope, concurrency of variations – increases space enormously but access higher order effects

8. The Bottom Lines Conceptual Framework for Adaptation explores how • Huge no of parameters characterise systems • Success of system depends on getting them right • ‘right’ is complex and context dependent • Problem ‘solved’ by adaptive processes – evolution and learning • But adaptation is not a free lunch • Huge no of parameters characterise adaptation • Success of adaptation depends on getting them right • ‘right’ is complex and context dependent •  also needs to be ‘solved’ by adaptive processes • We CAN do it!