Evolutionary Computation: An Overview

Abstract

Evolutionary computation is an area of computer science which uses ideas from biological evolution to solve computational problems. Many such problems require searching through a huge space of possibilities for solutions, such as among a vast number of possible hardware circuit layouts for a configuration that produces desired behavior, for a set of equations that will predict the ups and downs of a nancial market, or for a collection of rules that will control a robot as it navigates in its environment. Such computational problems often require a system to be adaptive -- that is, to continue to perform well in a changing environment. Problems like these require complex solutions that are usually difficult to program by hand. Artificial intelligence practitioners once believed that it would be straightforward to encode the rules that would confer intelligence on a program; expert systems were one result of this early optimism. Nowadays, however, many researchers believe ...