LCS & GBML Central

An oft posed question is how much is genetic programming used, “for real”? https://gpbib.cs.ucl.ac.uk/gp-html/jaws30_reply.html Today, although many papers propose new types of GP, most are about applying GP.  Many papers use real world datasets to show how good a novel form of GP is or to compare GP and other AI approaches.   Instead lets concentrate upon papers where GP is just being used and the application itself is the important thing.

Of course most industrialists are not interested in papers.  Indeed they may have sound commercial reasons for not publicising their results or even what they are interested in. Which always means numbers based on published work will be an underestimate.

Nonetheless, taking data for 2023 in the genetic programming bibliography https://gpbib.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ today as typical, about 38% (pm 5%) of papers are on applications.  About a quarter of all GP papers are on: Medicine, Civil Engineering or Material Science, often with an environmental or sustainability emphasis.

A quick reminder GP+EM articles published after 2 June 2023 are eligible to enter this year’s Human Competitive awards (competition closes to new entries on Friday May 31). Full details on line: https://human-competitive.org/call-for-entries

As with last year, the Humies will be held in hybrid mode, i.e. both in person in Melbourne and online, via video link. Prize money will be sent to the winners via wire transfer

Beginning with Volume 24, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines has adopted a “continuous publication” model, in which articles are published in open issues as soon as their production processes are complete. 

In this context it no longer seems to make sense to post new issue announcements on this blog. 

To see the latest published articles, please check the Volumes and Issues section of the journal’s website.

Dynamical interaction represents a fundamental coevolutionary rule that addresses the intricacies of cooperation in social dilemmas. It provides a normative account for the changes in ties within interaction networks in response to the behavior of social partners. While considerable efforts have explored the role of partner selection in fostering cooperation, there remains a limited understanding of how agents learn to establish effective interaction patterns and adapt their connections accordingly. To bridge this knowledge gap, we leverage recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) and propose an adaptive interaction mechanism to investigate self-organization behavior in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game. Within this framework, artificial agents are trained using a self-regarding Roth-Erev algorithm, utilizing reputation as a dynamic signal to update their willingness to engage with neighbors. Additionally, these agents are endowed with the capability to sever inactive connections. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing RL and local information from reputation to capture the dynamics of interactions. Notably, we discover that the entangled coevolution of strategy and interaction network can facilitate the emergence and maintenance of cooperation, despite the optimal tolerance threshold for ineffective neighbors varying depending on the strength of the social dilemma. Furthermore, the emerging network topology presented in this work accurately captures the assortative mixing pattern observed in previous experiments and realistic evidence. Finally, we validate the simulation results through theoretical analysis and confirm the robustness of the proposed mechanism across populations of varying sizes and initial structures.

The GECCO conference offers authors of recent GP+EM papers an opportunity to present it in front of an audience. See https://gecco-2023.sigevo.org/Call-for-HOPs

The fourth issue of Volume 23 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available for download.

This issue includes papers in the Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design.

It contains:

A novel tree-based representation for evolving analog circuits and its application to memristor-based pulse generation circuit
by Xinming Shi, Leandro L. Minku, and Xin Yao

Using estimation of distribution algorithm for procedural content generation in video games
by Arash Moradi Karkaj and Shahriar Lotfi

Complexity and aesthetics in generative and evolutionary art
by Jon McCormack and Camilo Cruz Gambardella

Experiments in evolutionary image enhancement with ELAINE
by João Correia, Daniel Lopes, Leonardo Vieira, Nereida Rodriguez-Fernandez, Adrian Carballal, Juan Romero and Penousal Machado

BOOK REVIEW
Melanie Mitchell: Artificial intelligence—a guide for thinking humans
by Didem Özkiziltan

BOOK REVIEW
Machado, Romero and Greenfield (editors): Artificial intelligence and the arts
by Anna Jordanous

BOOK REVIEW
The evolution of complexity
by Emily Dolson

BOOK REVIEW
Ying Bi, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang: Genetic programming for image classification—an automated approach to feature learning
by Amelia Zafra

The third issue of Volume 23 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available for download. 

This is a Special Issue on Highlights of Genetic Programming 2021 Events, edited by Leonardo Trujillo, Nuno Lourenço, Ting Hu, and Mengjie Zhang.

It contains:

Editorial Introduction
by Leonardo Trujillo, Ting Hu, Nuno Lourenço, and Mengjie Zhang

Interpretability in symbolic regression: a benchmark of explanatory methods using the Feynman data set
by Guilherme Seidyo Imai Aldeia and Fabrício Olivetti de França

Evolutionary approximation and neural architecture search
by Michal Pinos, Vojtech Mrazek, and Lukas Sekanina

Applying genetic programming to PSB2: the next generation program synthesis benchmark suite
by Thomas Helmuth and Peter Kelly

Severe damage recovery in evolving soft robots through differentiable programming
by Kazuya Horibe, Kathryn Walker, Rasmus Berg Palm, Shyam Sudhakaran, and Sebastian Risi

A grammar-based GP approach applied to the design of deep neural networks
by Ricardo H. R. Lima, Dimmy Magalhães, Aurora Pozo, Alexander Mendiburu, and Roberto Santana

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

These instructions give guidelines for preparing papers for this publication. Presents information for authors publishing in this journal.

Classification data are usually represented by many features, but not all of them are useful. Without domain knowledge, it is challenging to determine which features are useful. Feature selection is an effective preprocessing technique for enhancing the discriminating ability of data, but it is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem because of the challenges of the huge search space and complex interactions between features. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been successfully applied to feature selection due to its efficiency and easy implementation. However, most existing PSO-based feature selection methods still face the problem of falling into local optima. To solve this problem, this article proposes a novel PSO-based feature selection approach, which can continuously improve the quality of the population at each iteration. Specifically, a correlation-guided updating strategy based on the characteristic of data is developed, which can effectively use the information of the current population to generate more promising solutions. In addition, a particle selection strategy based on a surrogate technique is presented, which can efficiently select particles with better performance in both convergence and diversity to form a new population. Experimental comparing the proposed approach with a few state-of-the-art feature selection methods on 25 classification problems demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to select a smaller feature subset with higher classification accuracy in most cases.