Evolving Cultural Learning Parameters in an NK Fitness Landscape Dara Curran 1 , Colm O’Riordan 2 , and Humphrey Sorensen 3 1 Dept. of Computer Science, University College Cork, Ireland d.curran@cs.ucc.ie 2 Dept. of Information Technology, National University of Ireland, Galway colm.oriordan@nuigalway.ie 3 Dept. of Computer Science, University College Cork, Ireland sorensen@cs.ucc.ie Abstract. Cultural learning allows individuals to acquire knowledge from others through non-genetic means. The effect of cultural learn- ing on the evolution of artificial organisms has been the focus of much research. This paper examines the effects of cultural learning on the fitness and diversity of a population and, in addition, the effect of self- adaptive cultural learning parameters on the evolutionary process. The NK fitness landscape model is employed as the problem task and ex- periments employing populations endowed with both evolutionary and cultural learning are compared to those employing evolutionary learning alone. Our experiments measure the fitness and diversity of both populations and also track the values of two self-adaptive cultural parameters. Results show that the addition of cultural learning has a beneficial effect on the population in terms of fitness and diversity maintenance. Furthermore, analysis of the self-adaptive parameter values shows the relative quality of the cultural process throughout the experiment and highlights the benefits of self-adaptation over fixed parameter values. 1 Introduction A number of researchers have analysed the interactions between learning and evolution, where individuals within a population of artificial organisms are ca- pable of evolving genetically (evolutionary learning) and also of acquiring knowl- edge during their lifetime (lifetime learning). Hinton and Nowlan[1] were among the first to show that learning could guide evolution and a number of other researchers have since conducted experiments which support this view[2–4]. A population capable of passing information between individuals in a non- genetic way can be said to possess a culture. Culture can take many forms including language, artifacts or imitation, and a number of researchers have examined the effects of culture on evolution, as well as the emergence of culture itself[5][6][7][8][9]. The aim of this paper is to further existing research by examining the effects of allowing certain cultural learning parameters to self-adapt as the experiment