Deadline extended for Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms

The deadline for submitting papers to the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms has been extended.

The new deadline is: May 15, 2009

More information about the special issue is available here.

Evolution of Modularity, GP, and a new PLoS Computational Biology paper by Kashtan et al.

A new paper by Kashtan et al. in PLoS Computational Biology presents an interesting study of the evolution of modularity, extending their previous work showing "that modular structure can spontaneously emerge if goals (environments) change over time, such that each new goal shares the same set of sub-problems with previous goals."

The evolution of modularity is a topic of longstanding interest in GP and evolutionary computation more generally, within which we often seek to evolve modular programs or structures. Many also seek to leverage the modularity of representations to accelerate evolution. A lot of the work on automatically defined functions, etc., has been concerned with these issues and I think that cross-fertilization with the new computational biology results could be fruitful.

The closest thing that I know of in the GP literature to the Kashtan et al. results is a paper by Terry Van Belle and David Ackley in GECCO 2002, in which they observed the "evolution of evolvability in experiments using genetic programming to solve a symbolic regression problem that varies in a partially unpredictable manner." Alan Robinson and I were inspired by this to do a similar experiment in PushGP, which allows modularity to arise from scratch via code self-manipulation, and we wrote it up briefly in a GECCO 2002 Workshop paper (see section 3.2).

GPEM 10(2) now available online

The second issue of volume 10 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online, containing the following articles:

Incorporating characteristics of human creativity into an evolutionary art algorithm

by Steve DiPaola, Liane Gabora

Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis

by Stephan M. Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, Stefan Wagner

Dynamic limits for bloat control in genetic programming and a review of past and current bloat theories

by Sara Silva, Ernesto Costa

A review of procedures to evolve quantum algorithms

by Adrian Gepp, Phil Stocks

Book Review: Riccardo Poli, William B. Langdon, Nicholas F. McPhee: A Field Guide to Genetic Programming

by Michael O’Neill

Website for The Art of Artificial Evolution

A nice website has been set up for The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music, a book edited by Juan Romero and Penousal Machado that was reviewed by Jeroen Eggermont in GPEM 10(1).