John A: Bullinaria – författare

This volume collects together refereed versions of twenty-five papers presented at the 4th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, held at University College London in April 1997. The "NCPW" workshop series is now well established as a lively forum which brings together researchers from such diverse disciplines as artificial intelligence, mathematics, cognitive science, computer science, neurobiology, philosophy and psychology to discuss their work on connectionist modelling in psychology. The general theme of this fourth workshop in the series was "Connectionist Repre­ sentations", a topic which not only attracted participants from all these fields, but from allover the world as well. From the point of view of the conference organisers focusing on representational issues had the advantage that it immediately involved researchers from all branches of neural computation. Being so central both to psychology and to connectionist modelling, it is one area about which everyone in the field has their own strong views, and the diversity and quality of the presentations and, just as importantly, the discussion which followed them, certainly attested to this.

The papers address all current issues in biologically inspired computing; they are organized in topical sections on theoretical and foundational issues, new algorithms, applications, multi-objective optimization, co-evolution, robotics and multi-agent systems, and learning classifier systems and data mining.

We are very pleased to present this LNCS volume, the proceedings of the 8th InternationalConferenceonParallelProblemSolvingfromNature(PPSNVIII). PPSN is one of the most respected and highly regarded conference series in evolutionary computation and natural computing/computation. This biennial eventwas?rstheldinDortmundin1990,andtheninBrussels(1992),Jerusalem (1994), Berlin (1996), Amsterdam (1998), Paris (2000), and Granada (2002). PPSN VIII continues to be the conference of choice by researchers all over the world who value its high quality. We received a record 358 paper submissions this year. After an extensive peer review process involving more than 1100 reviews, the programme c- mittee selected the top 119 papers for inclusion in this volume and, of course, for presentation at the conference. This represents an acceptance rate of 33%. Please note that review reports with scores only but no textual comments were not considered in the chairs’ ranking decisions. The papers included in this volume cover a wide range of topics, from e- lutionary computation to swarm intelligence and from bio-inspired computing to real-world applications. They represent some of the latest and best research in evolutionary and natural computation. Following the PPSN tradition, all - persatPPSNVIII werepresentedasposters.Therewere7 sessions:eachsession consisting of around 17 papers. For each session, we covered as wide a range of topics as possible so that participants with di?erent interests would ?nd some relevant papers at every session.

This volume collects together refereed versions of twenty-five papers presented at the 4th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, held at University College London in April 1997. The "NCPW" workshop series is now well established as a lively forum which brings together researchers from such diverse disciplines as artificial intelligence, mathematics, cognitive science, computer science, neurobiology, philosophy and psychology to discuss their work on connectionist modelling in psychology. The general theme of this fourth workshop in the series was "Connectionist Repre­ sentations", a topic which not only attracted participants from all these fields, but from allover the world as well. From the point of view of the conference organisers focusing on representational issues had the advantage that it immediately involved researchers from all branches of neural computation. Being so central both to psychology and to connectionist modelling, it is one area about which everyone in the field has their own strong views, and the diversity and quality of the presentations and, just as importantly, the discussion which followed them, certainly attested to this.