Combining genes and memes to speed up evolution

It is recognized that the combination of genetic and local search can have strong synergistic effects. In same cases though, the local search mechanism can be too aggressive, mislead the evolutionary search and produce premature convergence. We set up a population of evolving agents also capable of learning by operant conditioning and communicating acquired behaviors (memes). The diffusion and discovery of memes gives rise to a second process of evolution atop of the genetic one. Memes are shown to have both guiding and hiding effects on baldwinian and lamarckian evolution. In contraposition to previous models, simulations show that back-coding of acquired behaviors is highly beneficial only at the beginning of the evolutionary search. This result arises because of the different nature of the guiding provided by memes and the hiding effect that they generate. To minimize the negative influence of the hiding effect but still benefit from the memetic guidance, we decrease the maximum number of memes that an agent can acquire as evolution proceeds. Agents can then develop the optimal harvesting strategy in incremental steps with a great performance advantage.