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Investigation into Open-Ended Fitness Landscape through Evolutionary Logical Circuits

Cumulative cultural evolution is what made humanity to thrive in various ecological and demographic environments. Solutions to the tasks that humans needed to solve could be mapped onto a task space which could take the form of either closed or open-ended fitness landscape, with the former being modeled more extensively than the latter in studies of cultural evolution. In this article, we modified a simulation by Arthur and Polak (2006) that modeled open-ended fitness landscape by using a computer simulation that builds logical circuits with circuits that were built in earlier trials. We used this simulation to clarify the nature of open-ended fitness landscape and to investigate whether the speed of accumulation of culture is increased by an increase in group size. The results indicated that group size increased the speed of accumulation but is limited than expected. Also, when two types of accumulation, invention and improvement, were distinguished the nature of the two differed. In improvement, the trajectory followed a convex function with productivity of one agent decreasing as group size increased. In invention, the trajectory showed a continuous pattern of rapid increase followed by a plateau.