New operator for the Traveling Salesman Problem

As announced, Darrell Whitley gave a talk on the new operator his team has designed for the classic TSP.

After doing a review of all the classical techniques and operators used to solve this problem, he introduces his new crossover operator that tries not to introduce new edges in the offspring, acting thus as a pure recombination operator, instead of a crossover+mutation. This new operator is called perfect crossover, and is first respectful, and then it transmits alleles. It’s not always possible to apply it, but in samples studied it works 95% of the time. When used in combination with other mutation operators in an evolutionary algorithm, it yields very good results; not completely competitive with the best results known, but almost there.
It’s been great to have such a great talker in our weekly seminars. You can also check out his paper Tunneling between optima: partition crossover for the traveling salesman problem online

GeNeura at GECCO

Almost half the GeNeura-people will be at the GECCO conference, presenting a number of papers and posters. Here are a few:

This one is about detecting buzz in document streams using evolutionary algorithms. It’s been tested on Blogalia comments and stories.
The second one is related to our world domination plan: use stealthy computation based on Ruby on Rails (whose draft is at ArXiV).

As I said in my personal blog, we could maybe meet up there. I think there are around 6-7 evo-bloggers around.