Concentrates on developing intuition about evolutionary computation and problem solving skills and tool sets.

Evolutionary Computation for Optimization and Modeling is an introduction to evolutionary computation, selectionist algorithms that operate on populations of structures. It includes over 100 experiments and over 700 homework problems that introduce the topic with an application-oriented approach. Engineering, computer science, and applied math students will find the book a useful guide to using evolutionary algorithms as a problem solving tool. No previous familliarity with evolutionary computation is assumed. The topics include the design of simple evolutionary algorithms, applications to several types of optimization, evolutionary robotics, simple evolutionary neural computation, and several types of automatic programming including genetic programming. The book gives applications to biology and bioinformatics and introduces a number of tools that can be used in biological modeling, including evolutionary game theory. The problem oriented approach of the book makes it a good text for engineering of computer science application classes.

An Overview of Evolutionary Computation.- Designing Simple Evolutionary Algorithms.- Optimizing Real-Valued Functions.- Sunburn: Coevolving Strings.- Small Neural Nets : Symbots.- Evolving Finite State Automata.- Ordered Structures.- Plus-One-Recall-Store.- Fitting to Data.- Tartarus: Discrete Robotics.- Evolving Logic Functions.- ISAc List: Alternative Genetic Programming.- Graph-Based Evolutionary Algorithms.- Cellular Encoding.- Application to Bioinformatics.