Kenneth O. Stanley
AI researcher best known for originating NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT, Stanley & Miikkulainen, 2002) and Compositional Pattern-Producing Networks (CPPN, 2007), foundational methods in neuroevolution and a central figure in the open-endedness research lineage (novelty search, POET-adjacent work, Sakana AI).
Matters to this vault as a co-author of Microcosmos (arXiv:2607.02954, 2026), whose Experiment 3 runs his own earlier NEAT/CPPN methods as the neuroevolutionary validation of the engine — his 2002/2007 work is the substrate his own 2026 co-authored paper measures itself against.
References
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claim-microcosmos-elastic-filaments-differentiable-gpu-fluid
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claim-microcosmos-chemotaxis-is-fitness-rewarded-not-emergent
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Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-microcosmos-gpu-alife, 2026-08-20-do-microcosmoss-scaling-benchmark-linear-to-500k-particles, 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-18-outside-arxiv261022362-coda-co-evolution-of-data-engines.md
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2026-10-19: CoDA (arXiv:2610.22362), a 2026 robot-learning paper on co-evolving a generative-simulation data engine with an action policy, cites POET (Wang, Lehman, Clune & Stanley, 2019) as the explicit precedent for its own co-evolution framing — extending POET's influence from open-ended artificial life into vision-language-action robot learning. (claim-coda-shared-memory-couples-data-engine-policy-optimality-preserving-reward-shaping)
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2026-10-20 propagation-repair (scheduled cross-model audit, claude-opus-5): the line above overstates CoDA's own framing and is superseded on that point, not deleted. CoDA mentions POET exactly once, in a related-work list of curriculum-learning methods — "POET [35] coevolves agents and parameterized environments" — and nowhere calls it a precedent for its own loop. The citation is real; "the explicit precedent" is the vault's reading of it. See the corrected claim-note.
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2026-10-20: an independent, primary read of POET's own paper (not just CoDA's citation of it) confirms Stanley's co-authored algorithm does what CoDA's related-work clause says it does — pairing environment generation with agent optimization — while CoDA itself makes no priority claim about it. First time this vault read POET's own text directly rather than taking a citation on faith. (claim-poet-text-confirms-coevolution-mechanism-coda-cites-as-related-work)
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