Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

A year and half ago, we built a 90-node diskless PC cluster, similar to (and inspired by) the Beawolf cluster in John Koza’s lab for running all our GEC experiments. We mostly use the cluster to run multiple GA runs to collect statistics, and also for testing the effect of different parameters on the scalability […]

In a recent post, Xavier talked about R, the excellent statistical package. I have used it extensively to compute statistical tests, and I made a script to automatize most of the testing process.
The script performs pairwise t-tests to compare multiple methods on several datasets. It uses the Bonferroni correction to ajust the significance level of […]

Sam Williams’s recent article “Unnatural Selection” in Technology Review is getting some blog traction. Franz Dill at the IFTF blog abstracted the original article and made comment about my comment. As an aside, I’m getting to be something of an IFTF blog fan. The report on P&G’s cool marketing usage of social […]

I want to comment on Paul Winward’s brief post regarding ISGEC becoming ACM’s newest SIG, SIGEVO. I’ve been heavily involved in the process of this transformation, and so my views are not entirely unbiased (no one’s views are entirely unbiased or so any good postmodernist would claim), but I think this move is good for […]

Acovea (analysis of compiler options via evolutionary algorithm) is an open source project which utilizes GAs to tune the optimization flags for GCC to yield the fastest code specifically for your computer. GCC has many flags for code optimization, and acovea finds the best combination for you by using GAs. Code […]

Science Daily posts a University of Michigan press release entitled Falling Prey to Machines? in which John Holland discusses the connection between contemporary science fiction such as Michael Crichton’s Prey, genetic algorithms, and the possibility of sentient computation.
“Computer sentience is possible,” said John Holland, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and professor of psychology […]

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that researchers at Laurentian University are using genetic algorithms to schedule mining of ore deposits. The article is remarkably bereft of details even by MSM standards. It is unclear from the article what the GA is actually going to do. No mention is made of who the reseachers are […]

A while ago, Christoph, a visiting student at the product development research lab was talking to me about how he was having some problems with solving certain instances of his seach problem. He told me that the problematic GA runs would converge to a mediocre solutions, but different parts within those solution were of good […]

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) have changed the way people approach to evolutionary algorithms. Recently, such approaches are slowly infiltrating in the learning classifier systems world.
Early efforts of Sierra, Jiménez, Inza, Larrañaga, and Muruzábal showed that such algorithms may also be used in genetics-based machine learning approaches. They build a simple Pittsburgh approach classifier based […]

You may be interested in knowing that GECCO-2005 received 557 submissions, an all time record for GECCO.
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