ABSTRACT
A Statistical Mechanician's Viewpoint on Genetic Dynamics
and Evolutionary Algorithms
Dr. C.R. Stephens
Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares,
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Department of Computer Science,
University of Birmingham
The seminar will review recent work on exact dynamical evolution equations for
genetic algorithms - in particular, showing how these equations in the
presence of genetic recombination naturally "coarse grain" in a way familiar
to statistical physicists through the renormalization group. This will lead to
a demonstration of how such a formulation produces new qualitative and
quantitative insights into the behaviour of genetic algorithms, and also makes
exact solutions possible in certain simple cases.
Dr. Stephens is a physicist by training, and is now a world expert on the
theoretical analysis of genetic algorithms. He has published a mathematically
rigerous formulation of the Schema Theorem for genetic algorithms. His Web
site is www.nuclecu.unam.mx/~nncp/people.html
Maintained by rbennett@cs.ucl.ac.uk