Evolving spring-mass models: a test-bed for graph encoding schemes

For many interesting design problems the solution is most naturally represented as a type of graph. This paper proposes that the problem of evolving spring-mass models for a set of design challenges makes an excellent test-bed for evaluating the performance of various graph encoding schemes. We describe how the problem is set up, and introduce a planar graph coding scheme. Results demonstrate that the planar graph encoding scheme significantly outperforms a simple direct encoding scheme on a height-challenge design problem