DebugNS: Novelty Search for Finding Bugs in Simulators

Abstract

Novelty search is used to find a range of novel behaviours in a system. Software bugs are behaviours that are a) unexpected and b) incorrect. As the intersection between “novel” and “unexpected” is non-empty, here we overview how novelty search can be employed to find bugs in simulation software. We give an example of this approach applied to the RingSim simulator.