Re: Article: How To Speed Up Evolution: Switch Goals

On Sep 1, 12:56 am, inm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 30, 7:10 pm, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <rston...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

How To Speed Up Evolution: Switch Goals

......
Although the main aim of this research, which appeared recently in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was to shed light on
theoretical questions of evolution, it may have some practical implications,
particularly in engineering fields in which evolutionary tools are commonly
used for systems design; and in computer science, by providing a possible
way to accelerate optimization algorithms.

Source: Weizmann Institute of Sciencehttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070828084425.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

This article will not exactly be news to those who do Evolutionary
Robotics, or similar. A Google search for "incremental evolution"
produces some 42,100 hits, and my casual skim over the first few
suggests that a large proportion refer to the practical use of such
techniques.

I described the basic ideas of incremental evolution in our own work
of Evolutionary Robotics in 1993, and numerous papers since then, on
my own publications page and elsewhere, have mentioned as a matter of
everyday common practice our practical knowledge that shaping
evolutionary pathways through intermediate goals can make it practical
to achieve end-goals that were not feasible in one jump. I have taught
this regularly to undergraduates and/or Masters students for over 10
years!

I will be pleased if these ideas are, through this paper, news and
perhaps fruitful to biologists and others who may not be aware of how
widely known this is in other disciplines.

Inman Harveywww.informatics.susx.ac.uk/users/inmanh

Not to belittle your contributions, the article described emphasizes
the speeding of evolution that occurs under both structured and random
regimes of goal change, and that the greater the complexity of the
goal the greater the speed-up obtained. It is freely available here:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/34/13711

An earlier related article is here:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/102/39/13773

--
Joe


.

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