Author: pelikan

New book Essentials of Metaheuristics by Sean Luke available online

A new book Essentials of Metaheuristics by Sean Luke is available online. The book can be downloaded for free on its web site. Information about the book from the author’s web site:

This is an open set of lecture notes on metaheuristics algorithms, intended for undergraduate students, practitioners, programmers, and other non-experts. It was developed as […]

A new book Essentials of Metaheuristics by Sean Luke is available online. The book can be downloaded for free on its web site. Information about the book from the author’s web site:

This is an open set of lecture notes on metaheuristics algorithms, intended for undergraduate students, practitioners, programmers, and other non-experts. It was developed as a series of lecture notes for an undergraduate course I taught at GMU. The chapters are designed to be printable separately if necessary. As it’s lecture notes, the topics are short and light on examples and theory. It’s best when complementing other texts. With time, I might remedy this.

BOA paper got ACM SIGEVO GECCO Impact Award

At the SIGEVO Meeting at GECCO-2009, the GECCO-99 paper introducing the Bayesian optimization algorithm (BOA) was one of the two papers that received GECCO Impact Award. This is a new award and it focuses on past GECCO papers that have made most impact and have had most citations. The paper was in fact a project […]

At the SIGEVO Meeting at GECCO-2009, the GECCO-99 paper introducing the Bayesian optimization algorithm (BOA) was one of the two papers that received GECCO Impact Award. This is a new award and it focuses on past GECCO papers that have made most impact and have had most citations. The paper was in fact a project from David Goldberg’s class Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning (GE-485) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The two awarded papers were:

  • M. Pelikan, D. Goldberg, E. Cantu-Paz (1999). BOA: The
    Bayesian Optimization Algorithm    . GECCO-99.
  • S. Hofmeyer, S. Forrest (1999). Immunity by Design: An
    Artificial Immune System    . GECCO-99.

Slides from my GECCO-2009 presentations

I just put the slides from my GECCO-2009 presentations online both on the MEDAL Publications page and on the slideshare.net. The slideshare.net versions are embedded below:
Initial-Population Bias in the Univariate Estimation of Distribution Algorithm
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Performance of Evolutionary Algorithms on NK Landscapes with Nearest Neighbor Interactions and Tunable Overlap
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Analysis […]

I just put the slides from my GECCO-2009 presentations online both on the MEDAL Publications page and on the slideshare.net. The slideshare.net versions are embedded below:

Initial-Population Bias in the Univariate Estimation of Distribution Algorithm

View more documents from pelikan.
Performance of Evolutionary Algorithms on NK Landscapes with Nearest Neighbor Interactions and Tunable Overlap

View more documents from pelikan.
Analysis of Evolutionary Algorithms on the One-Dimensional Spin Glass with Power-Law Interactions

View more documents from pelikan.

New issue of SIGEVOlution available now

The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download from http://www.sigevolution.org. For me, the main highlight of the issue is the interview with John H. Holland with an introduction by Lashon Booker.

The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download from http://www.sigevolution.org. For me, the main highlight of the issue is the interview with John H. Holland with an introduction by Lashon Booker.

John Holland to give a keynote at GECCO-2009 in Montreal, Canada

John H. Holland will give a keynote speech at GECCO-2009 on July 12, 2009 (Sunday), 10:40am-11:40am. The talk is entitled Genetic Algorithms: Long Ago [Past] and Far Away [Future] and the abstract of the talk follows:

It was in the mid-50’s of the 20th century when I realized that Fisher’s fundamental theorem could be extended […]

John H. Holland

John H. Holland will give a keynote speech at GECCO-2009 on July 12, 2009 (Sunday), 10:40am-11:40am. The talk is entitled Genetic Algorithms: Long Ago [Past] and Far Away [Future] and the abstract of the talk follows:

It was in the mid-50’s of the 20th century when I realized that Fisher’s fundamental theorem could be extended from individual alleles to co-adapted sets of alleles, without linearization. That led to a realization that recombination, rather than mutation, was the main mechanism providing grist for the natural selection mill. There was little theory concerning recombination in those days, but now recombination is a standard explanation for biological innovations, such as swine flu.

Much later, in the early 1990’s, GA’s provided the “adaptive” part of rule-based models of complex adaptive systems (CAS), such as the artificial stock market pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute. Tag-based signal processing occurs in systems as different as biological cells, language acquisition, and ecosystems. CAS models offer a unified way to study the on-going co-evolution of boundary and tag networks in these systems.

Another keynote speaker at GECCO-2009 is Demetri Terzopoulos, who will give the talk Artificial Life Simulation of Humans and Lower Animals: From Biomechanics to Intelligence on July 11 (Saturday) at 4.10pm-5.50pm. As if this wasn’t enough, GECCO-2009 will also feature an invited talk of Hans-Paul Schwefel at the Learning from Failures in Evolutionary Computation (LFFEC) Workshop, which is entitled Failures as stepping stones to success or per aspera ad astra.

More details can be found on GECCO-2009 webpage.

Highlight from Simulated Car Racing Competition at CEC-2009

Pier Luca Lanzi just posted a few video highlights from the Simulated Car Racing Competition at CEC-2009. The winner of the competition was Thies Lonneker and Martin Butz. Congratulations!
Here’s one of the posted videos:

See also Pier Luca’s post at IlliGAL Blogging.

Pier Luca Lanzi just posted a few video highlights from the Simulated Car Racing Competition at CEC-2009. The winner of the competition was Thies Lonneker and Martin Butz. Congratulations!

Here’s one of the posted videos:

See also Pier Luca’s post at IlliGAL Blogging.

Uday Chakraborty on flow-shop scheduling

Later today Uday Chakraborty is giving a talk on flow-shop scheduling as part of the weekly colloquium series at our department. The talk will be given at 4:00pm in room 320 CCB at UMSL. The abstract follows:

The flow shop scheduling problem, or the problem of assignment of times to a set of jobs for processing […]

Later today Uday Chakraborty is giving a talk on flow-shop scheduling as part of the weekly colloquium series at our department. The talk will be given at 4:00pm in room 320 CCB at UMSL. The abstract follows:

The flow shop scheduling problem, or the problem of assignment of times to a set of jobs for processing through a series of machines, is NP-complete and has long received the attention of researchers in operations research, engineering, and computer science. Over the past several years, there has been a spurt of interest in “intelligent” heuristics and metaheuristics for solving this problem — ranging from genetic algorithms to tabu search to complex hybrid techniques. This talk discusses some of the newest approaches to this problem, their shortcomings, and directions for future research.

Hans-Paul Schwefel to give a talk at GECCO-2009

I just found out that Hans-Paul Schwefel, one of the evolutionary computation pioneers, is going to give a talk at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2009) in Montreal, Canada (July 8-12, 2009). The talk will be part of the Learning from Failures in Evolutionary Computation (LFFEC) Workshop.
The title of the talk is failures […]

Hans-Paul Schwefel

I just found out that Hans-Paul Schwefel, one of the evolutionary computation pioneers, is going to give a talk at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2009) in Montreal, Canada (July 8-12, 2009). The talk will be part of the Learning from Failures in Evolutionary Computation (LFFEC) Workshop.

The title of the talk is failures as stepping stones to success or per aspera ad astra. The abstract follows:

The implicit thesis of this talk’s title will be underpinned with some examples from (my) real life. A first example leads back to the 1960s, when I simulated the (1+1)-ES with discrete mutations on a two-dimensional parabolic ridge by means of a Z23 computer. The result – getting stuck in certain search directions – led to making use of Gaussian variations. The second example comes from experimental investigations to determine the shape of a hot water flashing nozzle, the water being really hot and not simulated on a computer. In search for a multimembered evolutionary algorithm with effective self-adaptation of the mutation strengths, a couple of failures occurred. These, however, rendered deep insight into basic prerequisites to achieve the goal. And finally, some theory will be re-presented about the optimal failure rate in two black-box situations.

Of course, GECCO-2009 will feature many other interesting presentations, workshops, and other events and for more information about this conference, you should visit its web page here. GECCO is organized by ACM SIGEVO (Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation).

Genetic algorithm on Playstation PSP

Marcelo De Brito of Genetic Argonaut reports on the genetic algorithm implementation of a genetic algorithm on a Playstation PSP. The implementation is called Pyevolve. More can be found here.

Marcelo De Brito of Genetic Argonaut reports on the genetic algorithm implementation of a genetic algorithm on a Playstation PSP. The implementation is called Pyevolve. More can be found here.