Evolutionary Algorithms
“The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for
their lives.” –Richard Dawkins
Note: Final grades are available.
A few concluding remarks:
The submitted
projects were of a very high quality, as many of you actually did a
mini-thesis on the subject! I very much enjoyed teaching this course,
and I m happy to learn from your projects that you also enjoyed the
subject.
During this course,
we saw a wide range of problems for which evolutionary algorithms
provide efficient solutions. It is said that when the only tool you
have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. During the course
we saw that for many problems the key part is converting the problem
into a chromosome and finding a suitable fitness function. In other
words, having a hammer called EA, we actually tried to convert every
problem into a nail (and mostly succeeded!). Of course EA has its
shortcomings as well, and cannot solve every problem. But it is
usually worth the effort.
My goal in this
course was to add another tool called EA to your problem-solving
toolkit. If next time you ponder on a problem, it passes your mind
that you can try EA on it, then I have achieved my goal.
Thanks again to all
70+ of you for attending the course, and good luck!
--------------------------------------------
I. Welcome
Finally the course's
webpage is up and running. On this page you can find the course
syllabus and projects, and also some links to interesting EA-related
content.
II. Syllabus
Here is the list of
topics we will cover in the course:
syllabus.
There will be two
programming projects (50% of the grade) and the final exam will comprise the
remaining 50%.
You can find Ant
Colony Optimization presentation given by Israel Beniaminy
here.
III. Forum
Someone was kind
enough to open this forum on zoombut website, so here is the
unofficial course forum:
I will try to post there whenever I
can, especially if there are interesting questions there (by
"interesting" I don't mean "how do I compile this code?" sort of
questions... that's what Google is for!).
IV. Projects
There will be two
programming projects. You can submit them in pairs.
Project 1
(due: 14.12.08, extended until 16.12.08)
And one more thing,
these are NOT "programming exercises" where you just write a
bunch of code, compile it, and halleluiah it is working... The idea
behind each part is that you experiment with it, change the
parameters, play with all sort of bells and whistles and see how they
affect the algorithms... Take my word for it, it is quite fun when you
get the hang of it!
V. Grades
Final grades are
available at the following links. If your grade does not appear,
please let me know as soon as possible.
A fascinating talk by
Jeff Hawkins (who has written a very interesting book titled "On
Intelligence"). I highly recommend that you check the
TED website
for some other great talks.