Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download from:
http://www.sigevolution.org

The issue features:

• An Interview with John H. Holland with an introduction by Lashon Booker
• It’s Not Junk! by Clare Bates Congdon, H. Rex Gaskins, Gerardo M. Nava & Carolyn Mattingly
• car racing @ CIG-2008
• GECCO-2009 competitions
• new issues of journals
• calls & calendar

A new technical report was posted in the Illigal technical reports page (here). For a full list of Illigal reports click here.

New videos from the CEC-2009 simulated car racing competition are available for each one of the competitors:

• COBOSTAR (Winner of the CEC-2009 competition)
• Onieva and Pelta (2nd place)
• Cardamone (3rd place, winner of the CIG-2008 competition)
• Mr. Racer (4th place)
• Perez and Saez (5th place)
• Red Java (6th place)

Thies Lonneker & Martin Butz won the simulated car racing competition held at CEC-2009.

The competition highlights for all the races are available on youtube:

• Michigan Speedway
• Corkscrew
• Alpine 2

The competition is part of the Simulated Car Racing Championship 2009.

The next leg will be in GECCO-2009! We look forward to see new fastest opponents!

Besides his talk Thursday, 16 April 2009 (here), David E. Goldberg, IlliGAL director, will give another talk in Nottingham on Friday, 17 April 2009 at noon, Playing Well with Others in a Creative Era (here).

IlliGAL lab director, David E. Goldberg, will give a talk Not Your Grandmother’s Genetic Algorithm on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 from 12:00 to 13:00 in Lecture room C60, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

Abstract: Genetic algorithms (GAs)–search procedures inspired by the mechanics of natural selection and genetics–have been increasingly applied across the spectrum of human endeavor, but some researchers mistakenly think of them as slow, unreliable, and without much theoretical support. This talk briefly introduces GAs, but quickly shifts to a line of work that has succeeded in supporting GA mechanics with design theory that has been used to demonstrate GA scalability, speed, and range of reliable applicability. Key elements of this theory are discussed to give insight into this accomplishment and to make the point that fast, scalable GAs may also be viewed as first-order models of human innovative or inventive processes. The talk highlights recent results in breaking the billion-variable optimization barrier for the first time, and points to a variety of opportunities for efficiency enhancement that should be useful in the application of genetic algorithms to a variety of software engineering problems.

For more information about the talk contact Jaume Barcadit (jaume.bacardit@nottingham.ac.uk).

IlliGAL is now on twitter @illigal.

IlliGAL lab director, David E. Goldberg, is on twitter @deg511 and lab member Xavier Llora is @xllora.  The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education is @ifoundry.

LCSweb was designed to allow researchers and those seeking to use Learning Classifier Systems within applications access to material on LCS and discussion between members of the LCS community. The site served this community since its was started by Alwyn Barry in 1997. Enhanced and maintained later by Jan Drugowitsch, LCSweb became a valuable community resource. The site was completely community-driven and allowed members to contribute to the content of the site and keeping it up to date. Later on in 2005, I started “LCS and other GBML” Blog to cover a gap providing information information regarding the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS), the collection of LCS Books available, and GBML related news.Some of you may have realized that after Jan’s move to Rochester and Alwyn’s retirement from research activities, LCSweb has vanished. Will Browne took on himself to take LCSweb to Reading, but technical circumstances have made that move rocky despite his best efforts. Jan and Will however still have a local copy of LCSweb contents. After talking to Jan and Will, I proposed to merge LCSweb with the LCS and other GBML blog, and host the new site at NCSA where dedicated resources has been made available. Jan and Will agreed with the idea.We are happy to announce that the merged site (still under the update cycle) can be reached at http://lcs-gbml.ncsa.uiuc.edu. More information about the process can be found here or at there LCS & GBML Central site.

The second contest of the GECCO-2009 Simulated Car Racing competition, titled Optimizing Car Setup, officially starts today. More information on this nice brochure!