The bestest MasterMind Algorithm ever

Well, by now, you must be a bit tired of Mastermind papers but we are not, since we are obtaining the best results ever. After introducing end games to streamline the end of the algorithms, we have tweaked the evolutionary algorithm, adding a permutation operator, for instance, to reduce the number of evaluations needed to find the solution. The results is the best yet, but, of course, there’s more to come in the future.
This paper was presented at CEC 2011 in the games session, and raised quite a bit of interest. The paper will be available from IEEExplore soon, but you can request copies now if you want

From Emergence to Emergency (exit)

Despite the hotel’s firealarm, which forced us all to leave the room, out to the «pleasant» New Orleans’ weather, when I was on slide 12, I eventually finished the presentation of this paper in the 2011 Congress on Evolutionary Computation:

Fernandes, Isidoro, Barata, Merelo, Rosa, From Pherographia to Color Pherographia – Color Sketching with Artificial Ants

Abstract—Ant algorithms are known to return effective results in those problems that may be reduced to finding paths through a graph. However, this class of bio-inspired heuristics have raised the interest of the artistic community as well, namely of the artists that work on the blurred border between art and science. This paper describes an extension of an ant algorithm that, although has been designed as an edge detection tool and a model for collective perception, has also been used for creating artworks that were exhibited to a heterogeneous audience. The algorithm is a self-organized and stigmergic social insects’ model that is able to evolve lines along the contours of an image, in a decentralized and local manner. The result is the emergence of global patterns called pheromone maps. These maps – which were later named with the term pherographia – are grayscale sketches of the original black-and-white image on top of which the model evolves. This work goes beyond grayscale images and addresses colored pherographia, by proposing several image transformation and border selection methods based on behavioral variations of the basic algorithm.

Parallel Ants at IWANN 2011

Some days ago we presented at the IWANN Conference our new work devoted to study the parallelization of Multi-Objective Ant Colony Optimization algorithms (MOACOs) following different schemes.

It was a very funny presentation (and very interesting, of course :D), because the slides included some CC memes. ;)

These are the slides:

The whole paper can be found here.

Enjoy them! ;)

About Game Bots and Ambient Assisted Living

Last week we were in IWANN Conference, held in Torremolinos (Málaga), presenting two different works. The first one is about evolving IA bots for playing games in the Google AI Challenge. The basic idea is to improve the parameters of a hard-coded bot. Results shown that the default parameters we thought are important may be not work so good, and we can learn a lot of emerging behavior of the trained bot.

Here is the presentation:

Citation is here

The second one, is about a project I was working in last year. It’s about Ambient Assisted Living, Context-awareness and other stuff like that. The presentation is not so awesome. It was presented in the satellite workshop IWAAL.

You can download the paper in Springerlink here.

Doing evolutionary algorithms with Dropbox

Why not use Dropbox as its name implies, as a box for dropping individuals that could be interchanged among different islands running evolutionary algorithms?
That’s exactly what we are doing in a series of papers that are being published and presented in IWDECIE, CEC 2011 and GECCO, in last-in, first-out order. This presentation is for the second, presented today in CEC.

What we try to test in this paper is whether we can add a good number of computers (up to 4) without a saturation of the network (or of Dropbox itself), and whether there is a difference between wired and wireless. It so happens there is, but it gets smaller when you increase the number of computers.
IMG_0189
Still many tests to to, but for the time being this looks promising. We’ll link the paper when it’s available. For the time being, if you’re interested just send us an email