Before revision: Compared to physical systems that exhibit limited and mostly predetermined responses to external inputs, URLanisms show an enormous diversity of traits and an ability to evolve. Particular responses to different environmental conditions are developed URLanisms to adapt to varying environments. We study how such responses evolve by considering them as a mapping from environmental cues to phenotypic traits , modeled by a network with hidden units.
After revision: URLanisms exhibit diverse strategies for adapting to varying environments. For example, a population URLanisms may express the same phenotype in all environments (`unvarying strategy'), or follow environmental cues and express alternative phenotypes to match the environment (`tracking strategy'), or diversify into coexisting phenotypes to cope with environmental uncertainty (`bet-hedging strategy'). We introduce a general framework for studying URLanisms respond to environmental variations, which models an adaptation strategy by an abstract mapping from environmental cues to phenotypic traits , modeled by a network with hidden units.