Theoretical Aspects of Evolutionary Computing

During the first week of September 1999, the Second EvoNet Summer School on Theoretical Aspects of Evolutionary Computing was held at the Middelheim cam­ pus of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Originally intended as a small get­ together of PhD students interested in the theory of evolutionary computing, the summer school grew to become a successful combination of a four-day workshop with over twenty researchers in the field and a two-day lecture series open to a wider audience. This book is based on the lectures and workshop contributions of this summer school. Its first part consists of tutorial papers which introduce the reader to a num­ ber of important directions in the theory of evolutionary computing. The tutorials are at graduate level andassume only a basic backgroundin mathematics and com­ puter science. No prior knowledge ofevolutionary computing or its theory is nec­ essary. The second part of the book consists of technical papers, selected from the workshop contributions. A number of them build on the material of the tutorials, exploring the theory to research level. Other technical papers may require a visit to the library.

I: Tutorials.- to Evolutionary Computing in Design Search and Optimisation.- Evolutionary Algorithms and Constraint Satisfaction: Definitions, Survey, Methodology, and Research Directions.- The Dynamical Systems Model of the Simple Genetic Algorithm.- Modelling Genetic Algorithm Dynamics.- Statistical Mechanics Theory of Genetic Algorithms.- Theory of Evolution Strategies — A Tutorial.- Evolutionary Algorithms: From Recombination to Search Distributions.- Properties of Fitness Functions and Search Landscapes.- II: Technical Papers.- A Solvable Model of a Hard Optimisation Problem.- Bimodal Performance Profile of Evolutionary Search and the Effects of Crossover.- Evolution Strategies in Noisy Environments — A Survey of Existing Work.- Cyclic Attractors and Quasispecies Adaptability.- Genetic Algorithms in Time-Dependent Environments.- Statistical Machine Learning and Combinatorial Optimization.- Multi-Parent Scanning Crossover and Genetic Drift.- Harmonic Recombination for Evolutionary Computation.- How to Detect all Maxima of a Function.- On Classifications of Fitness Functions.- Genetic Search on Highly Symmetric Solution Spaces: Preliminary Results.- Structure Optimization and Isomorphisms.- Detecting Spin-Flip Symmetry in Optimization Problems.- Asymptotic Results for Genetic Algorithms with Applications to Nonlinear Estimation.