Population-Based Novelty Searches Can Converge

Abstract

Novelty search is a powerful tool for finding sets of complex objects in complicated, open-ended spaces. Recent empirical analysis on a simplified version of novelty search makes it clear that novelty search happens at the level of the archive space, not the individual point space. The sparseness measure and archive update criterion create a process that is driven by a clear pair of objectives: spread out to cover the space, while trying to remain as efficiently packed as possible driving these simplified variants to converge to an