Happy Birthday To Genetic Argonaut!!!!!

Last Tuesday was accomplished the second consecutive year that I keep on-line this humble and, as someone said elsewhere, relatively obscure blog. :)

By the way, I am happy with what has happened from last two years until now and I have found out so many interesting, nice, and friendly persons inside the so-called blogosphere.

It has been a long journey since my first evolutionary computation steps and I realize how many important things I have learned.

Surely I also found interesting and nice persons from academia - even though only via e-mail (at least all those outside Brazil)! :)

Here you are a little thank list:

Eurípedes Pinheiro dos Santos - The person who introduced me to this crazy and chaotic EC world! Thank you for all the coffee, A.I. papers, books, comments, conversations, critiques upon EC ("Genetic Algorithms are not a panacea!"), advices, help, explanations, funny moments, and your worthful friendship. :)

Hans-Paul Schwefel - Thank you for all advices (see below), helpful and (always) intelligent comments, your interesting critiques on the first version of the Evolutionary Computation Classics - Volume I, sensible suggestion about optimization in general, all the A.I./EC papers you sent me from Germany, and some funny e-mail moments - remember the Portuguese Space Program and the bumblebee jokes! :)

"My advice to young men (and women, of course) is always, NOT
to follow the advice of old men (and women). Just follow
your intuition after looking carefully around, taking into
consideration your skills and, above all, your curiosity and fun.
I never followed the advice of elder people, just tried to
increase the number of options I could get. What I earned this
way, was not what I aimed at (I wanted to become an astronaut just
after Sputnik I went into the orbit), but nevertheless I liked
how things were developing (of course, I tried to make things
happen that way, a bit)."

HPS


Antje Schwefel - Thank you for delivering my (skunk) texts of the Evolutionary Computation Classics - Volume I to your husband, the Power Point presentations you sent me via e-mail, the translation of my name to Chinese (see below), the funny moments we had while we were trying to translate my name to Chinese (I feel it difficult as a German to explain Chinese to a Brazilian using English!!!), and for your patience with me after I sent 50 (!!) questions to your husband to answer! :)












Marcelo = "The guy, who can hug a horse!"

Augusto = "This beginning is meaningful, based on history!"

Rasmus Ursem - For your helpful comments and explanations while I was implementing a Diversity Guided Genetic Algorithm (DGGA) - see here.



The DGGA (or DGEA - Diversity Guided Evolutionary Algorithms) is an interesting idea. Instead of using the operators of selection, mutation and crossover through the usual manner (such as in the Simple Genetic Algorithm), the DGEA uses a diversity measurement (see above) to switch between phases of exploitation - when selection and crossover (diversity decreasing operators) are more active and should exploit promising solutions - and exploration - when mutation (diversity increasing operator) is more active and should increase the diversity. Theoretically, the DGEA should be able to escape local optima because the operators will force higher diversity regardless of fitness.

It's a pity that I did not post anything about the DGEA I wrote and the comparison I made among a DGEA, a GA, and an ES. The ES was more robust than the other two.

Xin Yao - Thank you for replying me (via e-mail) some questions about evolutionary computation in general.

Zbigniew Michalewicz - Thank you for replying me (also through e-mail) some questions about evolutionary computation in general.

David E. Goldberg - Thank you for the argumentation upon genetic algorithms and patents. Thank you also for linking my blog from yours.

Amir massoud Farahmand - Thank you for your friendly comments at my blog and, also, for the nice blog interaction we have had. :)

Julian Togelius - Thank you for all those nice and interesting videos upon car control through artificial intelligence! It was nice to see that I am not the only guy in the blogosphere who uses Evolution Strategies (ES) - Julian uses ES to evolve neural networks. Keep posting cool stuffs like those! :)

Damien François - Thank you for linking my blog from yours and, also, for the post you made upon my posting on evolving lens through evolutionary algorithms.

The Link Index - Thank you for linking my blog from your blogs!

Thank you to all those friends who visit, link to, and read this simple blog! :)

Até Mais!!! :)