https://neuroevolutionbook.com
Neuroevolution: Harnessing Creativity in AI Agent Design
An MIT Press Book
by Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, David Ha, and Risto Miikkulainen,
Foreword by Melanie Mitchell
The online version of the book is now freely available in an open-access HTML format. The print edition will be released in October 2026.
Neuroevolution is a population-based search method that makes it possible to train neural networks when training targets are not known, and good performance requires many decisions over time, such as robotic control, game playing, and decision-making. This is the first comprehensive book on this topic: It reviews decades of work on building intelligent agents for such tasks, recent approaches for optimizing deep learning, RL, and GenAI models, experiments to gain insight into biological intelligence, and methods for optimizing neural networks for hardware implementation. In all these areas neuroevolution can be harnessed to discover surprising, effective solutions that often elude human designers. In addition to the book, the website includes animations, interactive demos, tutorials, exercises, and class materials that illustrate neuroevolution at work, and can serve as a starting point for your own explorations in creative agent design. We hope you find these resources useful!
An advanced undergraduate (or graduate) course based on the book was taught by Risto in Fall 2024. All the public materials for it (syllabus, reading, slides-4up, lecture recordings, exercises) are available at the course website. The materials intended for instructors only (Overleaf sources for the slides and the solutions for the exercises) are available upon request at the “For Instructors Only” page.
