Kenneth O. Stanley

Kenneth O. Stanley is a computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher who currently serves as Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences. He is best known as the creator of the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm and the novelty search algorithm, both foundational contributions to evolutionary computation. He is also the co-author, with Joel Lehman, of the book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, which argues that open-ended exploration rather than fixed objectives drives breakthrough innovation.