by Xavier Llorà, Kumara Sastry, David E. Goldberg, and Luis de la Ossa (2006). To appear in the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS 2006). Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006015. Link to the PDF. Abstract This paper proposes a competent Pittsburgh LCS that automatically mines important substructures of the underlying problems and takes problems that were intractable with first-generation Pittsburgh LCS and renders them tractable. Specifically, we propose a χ-ary extended compact classifier system (χeCCS) which uses (1) a competent genetic algorithm (GA) in the form of χ-ary extended compact genetic algorithm, and (2) a niching method in the form restricted tournament replacement, to evolve a set of maximally accurate and maximally general rules. The results clearly show that linkage exists in the multiplexer problem which needs to be accurately discovered and efficiently processed in order to solve the problem in tractable time. The results also show that in accordance with the facetwise models from GA theory, the number of function evaluations required by χeCCs to successfully evolve an optimal rule set scales exponentially with the number of address bits (building block size) and quadratically with the problem size. ...

The agenda for the Ninth International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS’2006) can be found here. The workshop is coming with a list of very interesting papers and topics. We are looking forward to another edition of the workshop crowded of new and exiting ideas. If you are in GECCO, do not let it pass by ;). By the way, if you want to dig a little further into the learning classifier systems (LCS) and other genetics-based machine learning (GBML) world, check the website of the NCSA/IlliGAL Gathering on Evolutionary Learning (NIGEL’2006). It contains the slides and videos of the talks on cutting-edge LCS and GBML research. ...

A friend sent this Flash animation link earlier today to one of the e-mail lists I am subscribed. Everybody has gone nuts trying to get farther and farther. The last thing I heard was 577.6.

Yes, with the new update of the website GALE was unreachable for a while. Here it is the original code again. Please, take a few minutes to read this post. Hope you find it useful. Enjoy :D GALE? GALE (Genetic and Artificial Life Environment) is fine-grained parallel genetic algorithm for data mining. Its main contributions are simplicity and its knowledge-independent model. The simplicity of GALE relies in its fine-grained parallelism based on spreading the population (feasible solutions to the classification task) over a 2D grid. Thus, artificial evolution can be easily modeled in terms of neighborhood relations. These neighborhood relations define GALE as a massive parallel evolutionary model. On the other hand, GALE does not constrain the knowledge representation. It can evolve indistinctly rules, instances, partially defined instances, and decision trees (orthogonal, oblique, and multivariate based on nearest neighbor). ...

As Kumara blogged here, we went to the Beale Street Music Festival that takes place during Menphis in May. Yup, as the name says it happens in May in Memphis, Tennessee. This year was an unique opportunity to see in the same festival names like B. B. King, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hubbert Sumlin, and James Brown—to mention a few. The picture above is B. B. King roaring on “How blue can you get”. Breathless. Oh, I almost forgot, we also paid tribute to the other Memphis King. Graceland has become a fascinating monument to the Elvis icon. It has been a long time since I was this fascinated for the eclecticism of a place—maybe roaming the streets of Las Vegas is the closest feeling. I have to admit that 60’s and 70’s iconography has always amused me. To boost the surrealistic feeling during our tour in Graceland we were not aloud to leave the King’s house. We were trap inside because they were filming the American Idol show. Fascinating. ...