Lawrence David Davis – författare

The IMA Workshop on Evolutionary Algorithms brought together many of the top researchers in the area of Evolutionary Computation for a week of intensive interaction. The field of Evolutionary Computation has developed significantly over the past 30 years and today consists of a variety of subfields such as genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, and genetic programming, each with its own algorithmic perspectives and goals. The workshop did a great deal to clarify the current state of the theory of Evolutionary Algorithms. The existing theory might be characterized as deriving from two principal approaches. There is a high level macro-theory that looks at the processing of "building blocks" and "schemata" that are shared by many good solutions when searching a problem space. There is also a low level micro-theory that builds exact Markov models of the search process. It is sometimes hard for researchers working at such different levels of abstraction to interact. The IMA workshop allowed researchers working at these different levels to present their points of view and to move toward common ground.There was real progress in communication between theorists and practitioners in the evolutionary computation field. Speakers presented applications across a wide range of problem areas. In some of those cases, theoretically motivated methods work quite well. In other cases, practitioners used domain-based methods to obtain better performance than could be achieved by using a "pure" evolutionary algorithm. Individuals on both sides went away with a better appreciation of the successes and failures of current theory.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 5th Annual Genetic and EvolutionaryComputationConference(GECCO2003).Theconferencewasheld in Chicago, USA, July 12-16, 2003. A total of 417 papers were submitted to GECCO 2003. After a rigorous doubleblind reviewing process, 194 papers were accepted for full publication and oral presentation at the conference, resulting in an acceptance rate of 46.5%. An additional 92 submissions were accepted as posters with two-page extended abstracts included in these proceedings. This edition of GECCO was the union of the 8th Annual Genetic Progr- mingConference(whichhasmetannuallysince1996)andthe12thInternational Conference on Genetic Algorithms (which, with its ?rst meeting in 1985, is the longest running conference in the ?eld). Since 1999, these conferences have m- ged to produce a single large meeting that welcomes an increasingly wide array of topics related to genetic and evolutionary computation. Possibly the most visible innovation in GECCO 2003 was the publication of theproceedingswithSpringer-VerlagaspartoftheirLectureNotesinComputer Science series.This will make the proceedings available in many libraries as well asonline,wideningthedisseminationoftheresearchpresentedattheconference. OtherinnovationsincludedanewtrackonCoevolutionandArti?cialImmune Systems and the expansion of the DNA and Molecular Computing track to include quantum computation. In addition to the presentation of the papers contained in these proceedings, the conference included 13 workshops, 32 tutorials by leading specialists, and presentation of late-breaking papers. GECCO is sponsored by the International Society for Genetic and Evolut- nary Computation (ISGEC). The ISGEC by-laws contain explicit guidance on the organization of the conference, including the following principles: (i)GECCOshouldbeabroad-basedconferenceencompassingthewhole?eld of genetic and evolutionary computation.