Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

I recently bumped into a paper titled ‘The Equilibrium Genetic
Algorithm and the Role of Crossover’. It’s a beautiful paper
that describes the first EDA ever that I’m aware of (not
counting Syswerda’s BSC as an EDA). The first author is
Ari Juels
(Shumeet Baluja and Alistair Sinclair are co-authors).
It’s from Nov/1993 and predates Baluja’s PBIL. I found it on
citeseer. You can reach it by googling for ‘Equilibrium Genetic
Algorithm’.

It’s a pity that such a work is unknown in the EC community and
that Juels doesn’t get any credit for it. I just re-read
Baluja’s 94 PBIL tech report and noticed that he does cite
Juels’ personal communication. Truth be told, PBIL is just EGA
with another name.

I found Juels’ email address on the web and congratulated him
for the nice paper. I asked him if he ever published it. I
noticed that he doesn’t work on optimization anymore and so I
also told him that EDAs are now a hot topic in Evolutionary
Computation. I apologized him for never citing him but I was
simply not aware of his work. I also sent him the CGA and ECGA
papers as I thought he might be interested in knowing about
them. He sent me a nice message back saying that he doesn’t
think he ever made a tech report out of it. He said he tried
several times to publish the paper when he was a grad student
but it was consistently rejected. Then, eventually he just gave
up on it (in part because he started working on something else,
data security). He seemed happy to to get my email message and
told me that it is very rewarding to know (after all these
years) that he was on the right track.