ABSTRACT

No Free Lunch and Beyond

Prof Darrell Whitley out going Editor of Evolutionary Computation and head of the Colorado State Artificial Intelligence Lab

The "No Free Lunch" Theorem asserts that all search algorithms have the same expected behaviour over all possible discrete search problems. Recent proofs show that No Free Lunch holds over finite sets of functions, some of which are compressible and some of which are not. Other recent proofs show that the No Free Lunch Theorem does not hold over very board sets of functions, including polynomial functions of bounded complexity, and problems classes such as the set of NP-Complete problems. This talk will look at some of the theoretical and practical implications of No Free Lunch theorems. These results have a very real impact on how we compare and evaluate search algorithms. Simple "No Free Lunch" results for machine learning and representations will also be discussed.

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/directions.html

Prof Whitley will be travelling from the USA. Visitors, who have some distance to travel, may wish to confirm before setting off.

Maintained by rbennett@cs.ucl.ac.uk