Hyperadaptability Through Self-Organizing Behavioral Search

Artificially replicating the extraordinary adaptive potential of organisms remains difficult. Machine learning approaches based on big data pursue behavioral adaptation through generalization from training data, but often learn slowly and struggle with out-of-distribution situations. We propose that organisms may not adapt primarily through generalization alone but by rapidly eliminating infeasible solutions through online trial-and-error, effectively performing a search over the behavior space. If this search is complete, it is guaranteed to find an existing physically robust solution within a finite but unbounded time. For continuous behavioral domains that contain uncountably infinite behaviors, we introduce a mathematical framework for constructing a countably infinite dense subset of all behaviors using a mutable graph to segment behavior space, allowing any behavior to be progressively approximated arbitrarily well. Graph evolution is regulated by a heuristic feedback loop between outward growth and internal refinement; refinement is partially determined by a Bernoulli variance term related to binary entropy. Using this construction, we implement a proof-of-concept behavioral search algorithm and evaluate it on maze navigation and simple continuous control tasks. These preliminary results establish the practical feasibility of this approach in low-dimensional simulated environments while exposing unresolved limitations in terms of dimensional scaling and the incorporation of prior information.

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Publication Details

Journal
Entropy
Published
2026-09-11
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/e28091013
Primary Topic
Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Hyperadaptability Through Self-Organizing Behavioral Search

Jun Tani, Alex Baranski
Entropy
Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications
article

Hyperadaptability Through Self-Organizing Behavioral Search

Jun Tani, Alex Baranski
article en

Abstract

Artificially replicating the extraordinary adaptive potential of organisms remains difficult. Machine learning approaches based on big data pursue behavioral adaptation through generalization from training data, but often learn slowly and struggle with out-of-distribution situations. We propose that organisms may not adapt primarily through generalization alone but by rapidly eliminating infeasible solutions through online trial-and-error, effectively performing a search over the behavior space. If this search is complete, it is guaranteed to find an existing physically robust solution within a finite but unbounded time. For continuous behavioral domains that contain uncountably infinite behaviors, we introduce a mathematical framework for constructing a countably infinite dense subset of all behaviors using a mutable graph to segment behavior space, allowing any behavior to be progressively approximated arbitrarily well. Graph evolution is regulated by a heuristic feedback loop between outward growth and internal refinement; refinement is partially determined by a Bernoulli variance term related to binary entropy. Using this construction, we implement a proof-of-concept behavioral search algorithm and evaluate it on maze navigation and simple continuous control tasks. These preliminary results establish the practical feasibility of this approach in low-dimensional simulated environments while exposing unresolved limitations in terms of dimensional scaling and the incorporation of prior information.

EntropyVol. 28(9)
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (JP)
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
Openalex Percentile: Top 8%
Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications
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