Faber Neuroevolution · live workbench · Programme 7
Neural coevolution: pursuers vs evaders
Pursuers want to catch, evaders want to survive. Given a small speed edge the pursuer learns to catch, then dominates: the evader's gradient dies. That is disengagement, one of the three coevolution outcomes, and it is why a genuine arms race is hard. Watch the evolved champions play, then read the curves that never became a race.
Champion match
step 0/12● pursuer (1.5× speed) ● evader
Coevolution (no arms race)
progress vs frozen gen-0 opponents; head-to-head pinned = disengagement
The curves never climb into a mutual arms race: the pursuer's benchmark progress rises as it learns to catch, and its head-to-head score pins at the top -- it dominates the current evader, which can never pull ahead. Tip the balance the other way -- equal speed -- and the evader escapes forever instead. A sustained two-sided arms race sits on a knife-edge between, and finding it is the open problem the embodied Programme-7 rung exists to tackle. That is the honest state of the art, measured with the instruments the numerical rungs proved correct.