{"id":3397,"date":"2022-07-20T04:34:20","date_gmt":"2022-07-20T04:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alife.org\/?post_type=encyclopedia&p=3397"},"modified":"2022-07-20T04:34:23","modified_gmt":"2022-07-20T04:34:23","slug":"phenotype","status":"publish","type":"encyclopedia","link":"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/introduction\/phenotype\/","title":{"rendered":"Phenotype"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In biology, a phenotype is some observable property of an individual that is encoded by its genes (often in combination with its environment). In artificial life<\/a>, phenotype means roughly the same thing, but this word is sometimes used in ways that feel inconsistent to newcomers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To help clarify, here is a lightly-edited version of a stackoverflow answer<\/a> that Emily Dolson wrote on this topic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People who study artificial life and evolutionary computation sometimes use the words “genotype” and “phenotype” inconsistently. The only rule that holds true across all systems is that the genotype is a lower-level (i.e. less abstracted) encoding than the phenotype.<\/strong> A consequence of this rule is that there can generally be multiple genotypes that map to the same phenotype, but not the other way around (at least in the context of a static environment and deterministic organisms). In some systems, there are really only two levels of abstraction: the representation of a solution and the solution itself. In these cases, the former is the genotype and the latter is the phenotype.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This holds true for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n