Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

Blogger and regular reader Nosophorus asks the following:
…I only know that those Competent GAs “refer to principled procedures that solve a large category of hard problems quickly, reliably, and accurately”. However, there is some canonical form for those GAs ?? There is some paper that reports about those GAs…
I’m glad you asked. Competent GAs take […]

An earlier post by Martin Pelikan made some laudatory remarks about Marc Toussaint’s compression evolutionary algorithm (see here), and on the face of it the work appears to rival the best competent GAs, but further investigation shows that the compression EA only performs well on problems with tight linkage. This is a severe limitation, and […]

I ran into an interesting article by Clay Shirky here. The article explores the blog ecosystem under the light of power laws and social networks. This is a snippet of the article:
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of […]

IlliGAL Blogging readers will have noticed an increase in comment spam on the site, whereby irrelevant comments are posted by bots or other malicious entities. To fight this scourge, IB has taken two steps. First, the blog will no longer accept anonymous posts. All commentators will be required to have a Blogger […]

Judea Pearl stopped by UIUC today. He gave a talk entitled “The mathematics of causal reasoning” at Siebel Center. I won’t highlight the contents of the talk, I won’t be able to make justice to it. In a nutshell, it was a blast. However, I want to post a sentence of his lecture:

Computer science is […]

Check out the new DISCUS (distributed innovation and scalable collaboration) site here. A previous story about DISCUS is available here. One cool feature is that you can run your own KeyGraph by pasting in appropriate text.
Related PostsDISCUS unleashedReady, steady,…Let’s dance

Over the weekend, Max and I visited Eckerd College in St Petersburg, FL as part of our continuing series of college visits (see here to traceback earlier blog entries). The setting was lovely, and the food and dorms were as nice as any we have seen. Compared to the other small schools we visited (Earlham, […]

My new short course, The Entrepreneurial Engineer, is online and ready to go here. The online course uses video and synchronized powerpoint in eleven lecture modules (see here) to cover key personal, interpersonal, and organizational skills necessary for engineering success in an age of opportunity. Check out the free course preview here or signup for […]

In workshops, it is a commonplace to take a large group meeting and divide it into a number of equally sized subgroups to give each person more of a chance to participate in the same amount of time. To share the discussion results at the end, each group presents a short report to the full […]

I just looked at the link suggested by the previous post “Tag and a squiggle” and discovered the “Processing” programming language. It is an open source programming environment for programming images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.
Related PostsTag and a squiggleA simple […]