Evolutionary Computation

This text is an introduction to the field of evolutionary computation. It approaches evolution strategies and genetic programming, as instances of a more general class of evolutionary algorithms.

The first complete overview of evolutionary computing, the collective name for a range of problem-solving techniques based on principles of biological evolution, such as natural selection and genetic inheritance. The text is aimed directly at lecturers and graduate and undergraduate students. It is also meant for those who wish to apply evolutionary computing to a particular problem or within a given application area. The book contains quick-reference information on the current state-of-the-art in a wide range of related topics, so it is of interest not just to evolutionary computing specialists but to researchers working in other fields.

Rapid advances in evolutionary computation have opened up a world of applications-a world rapidly growing and evolving. Decision making, neural networks, pattern recognition, complex optimization/search tasks, scheduling, control, automated programming, and cellular automata applications all rely on evolutionary computation. Evolutionary Computation presents the basic principles of evolutionary computing: genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, genetic programming, learning classifier systems, population models, and applications. It includes detailed coverage of binary and real encoding, including selection, crossover, and mutation, and discusses the (m+l) and (m,l) evolution strategy principles. The focus then shifts to applications: decision strategy selection, training and design of neural networks, several approaches to pattern recognition, cellular automata, applications of genetic programming, and more.

Concentrates on developing intuition about evolutionary computation and problem solving skills and tool sets. Lots of applications and test problems, including a biotechnology chapter.

The vast majority of real-world problems can be expressed as an optimisation task by formulating an objective function, also known as cost or fitness function. The most logical methods to optimise such a function when (1) an analytical expression is not available, (2) mathematical hypotheses do not hold, and (3) the dimensionality of the problem or stringent real-time requirements make it infeasible to find an exact solution mathematically are from the field of Evolutionary Computation (EC) and Swarm Intelligence (SI). The latter are broad and still growing subjects in Computer Science in the study of metaheuristic approaches, i.e., those approaches which do not make any assumptions about the problem function, inspired from natural phenomena such as, in the first place, the evolution process and the collaborative behaviours of groups of animals and communities, respectively. This book contains recent advances in the EC and SI fields, covering most themes currently receiving a great deal of attention such as benchmarking and tunning of optimisation algorithms, their algorithm design process, and their application to solve challenging real-world problems to face large-scale domains.

Part 1: Fascinating Evolution -- Part 2: Evolutionary Computation -- Part 3: If Darwin was a Programmer -- Part 4: Evolution of Developmental Programs.

This edited book reports on recent developments in the theory of evolutionary computation, or more generally the domain of randomized search heuristics. It starts with two chapters on mathematical methods that are often used in the analysis of randomized search heuristics, followed by three chapters on how to measure the complexity of a search heuristic: black-box complexity, a counterpart of classical complexity theory in black-box optimization; parameterized complexity, aimed at a more fine-grained view of the difficulty of problems; and the fixed-budget perspective, which answers the question of how good a solution will be after investing a certain computational budget. The book then describes theoretical results on three important questions in evolutionary computation: how to profit from changing the parameters during the run of an algorithm; how evolutionary algorithms cope with dynamically changing or stochastic environments; and how population diversity influences performance. Finally, the book looks at three algorithm classes that have only recently become the focus of theoretical work: estimation-of-distribution algorithms; artificial immune systems; and genetic programming. Throughout the book the contributing authors try to develop an understanding for how these methods work, and why they are so successful in many applications. The book will be useful for students and researchers in theoretical computer science and evolutionary computing.

As of today, Evolutionary Computing and Fuzzy Set Computing are two mature, wen -developed, and higbly advanced technologies of information processing. Bach of them has its own clearly defined research agenda, specific goals to be achieved, and a wen setUed algorithmic environment. Concisely speaking, Evolutionary Computing (EC) is aimed at a coherent population -oriented methodology of structural and parametric optimization of a diversity of systems. In addition to this broad spectrum of such optimization applications, this paradigm otTers an important ability to cope with realistic goals and design objectives reflected in the form of relevant fitness functions. The GA search (which is often regarded as a dominant domain among other techniques of EC such as evolutionary strategies, genetic programming or evolutionary programming) delivers a great deal of efficiency helping navigate through large search spaces. The main thrust of fuzzy sets is in representing and managing nonnumeric (linguistic) information. The key notion (whose conceptual as weH as algorithmic importance has started to increase in the recent years) is that of information granularity. It somewhat concurs with the principle of incompatibility coined by L. A. Zadeh. Fuzzy sets form a vehic1e helpful in expressing a granular character of information to be captured. Once quantified via fuzzy sets or fuzzy relations, the domain knowledge could be used efficiently very often reducing a heavy computation burden when analyzing and optimizing complex systems.