One of the main reasons for the success of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) is their general-purposeness, i.e., the fact that they can be applied straightforwardly to a broad range of optimization problems, without any specific prior knowledge. On the other hand, it has been shown that incorporating a priori knowledge, such as expert knowledge or empirical findings, can significantly improve the performance of an EA. However, integrating knowledge in EAs poses numerous challenges. It is often the case that the features of the search space are unknown, hence any knowledge associated with the search space properties can be hardly used. In addition, a priori knowledge is typically problem-specific and hard to generalize. In this paper, we propose a framework, called Knowledge Integrated Evolutionary Algorithm (KIEA), which facilitates the integration of existing knowledge into EAs. Notably, the KIEA framework is EA-agnostic (i.e., it works with any evolutionary algorithm), problem-independent (i.e., it is not dedicated to a specific type of problems), expandable (i.e., its knowledge base can grow over time). Furthermore, the framework integrates knowledge while the EA is running, thus optimizing the use of the needed computational power. In the preliminary experiments shown here, we observe that the KIEA framework produces in the worst case an 80% improvement on the converge time, w.r.t. the corresponding "knowledge-free" EA counterpart.

SYNTHETIC cells made by combining components of Mycoplasma bacteria with a chemically synthesised genome can grow and divide into cells of uniform shape and size, just like most natural bacterial cells. In 2016, researchers led by Craig Venter at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, California, announced that they had created synthetic "minimal" cells. The genome in each cell contained just 473 key genes thought to be essential for life. The cells were named JCVI-syn3.0 But on closer inspection of the dividing cells, Elizabeth Strychalski at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and her colleagues noticed that they weren't splitting uniformly and evenly to produce identical daughter cells as most natural bacteria do.

We investigate the addition of constraints on the function image and its derivatives for the incorporation of prior knowledge in symbolic regression. The approach is called shape-constrained symbolic regression and allows us to enforce e.g. monotonicity of the function over selected inputs. The aim is to find models which conform to expected behaviour and which have improved extrapolation capabilities. We demonstrate the feasibility of the idea and propose and compare two evolutionary algorithms for shape-constrained symbolic regression: i) an extension of tree-based genetic programming which discards infeasible solutions in the selection step, and ii) a two population evolutionary algorithm that separates the feasible from the infeasible solutions. In both algorithms we use interval arithmetic to approximate bounds for models and their partial derivatives. The algorithms are tested on a set of 19 synthetic and four real-world regression problems. Both algorithms are able to identify models which conform to shape constraints which is not the case for the unmodified symbolic regression algorithms. However, the predictive accuracy of models with constraints is worse on the training set and the test set. Shape-constrained polynomial regression produces the best results for the test set but also significantly larger models.

Competitive board games have provided a rich and diverse testbed for artificial intelligence. This paper contends that collaborative board games pose a different challenge to artificial intelligence as it must balance short-term risk mitigation with long-term winning strategies. Collaborative board games task all players to coordinate their different powers or pool their resources to overcome an escalating challenge posed by the board and a stochastic ruleset. This paper focuses on the exemplary collaborative board game Pandemic and presents a rolling horizon evolutionary algorithm designed specifically for this game. The complex way in which the Pandemic game state changes in a stochastic but predictable way required a number of specially designed forward models, macro-action representations for decision-making, and repair functions for the genetic operations of the evolutionary algorithm. Variants of the algorithm which explore optimistic versus pessimistic game state evaluations, different mutation rates and event horizons are compared against a baseline hierarchical policy agent. Results show that an evolutionary approach via short-horizon rollouts can better account for the future dangers that the board may introduce, and guard against them. Results highlight the types of challenges that collaborative board games pose to artificial intelligence, especially for handling multi-player collaboration interactions.

In the world of the Internet and World Wide Web, which offers a tremendous amount of information, an increasing emphasis is being given to searching services and functionality. Currently, a majority of web portals offer their searching utilities, be it better or worse. These can search for the content within the sites, mainly text the textual content of documents. In this paper a novel similarity measure called SMDR (Similarity Measure for Documents Retrieval) is proposed to help retrieve more similar documents from the repository thus contributing considerably to the effectiveness of Web Information Retrieval (WIR) process. Bio-inspired PSO methodology is used with the intent to reduce the response time of the system and optimizes WIR process, hence contributes to the efficiency of the system. This paper also demonstrates a comparative study of the proposed system with the existing method in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, F-measure and specificity. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on CACM collections. Better precision-recall rates are achieved than the existing system. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system.

Researchers have used advanced AI and large sets of genomic data to unveil how humans have adapted to recent diseases. The method could also be applied to new pathogens such as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, helping identify which gene mutations may be associated with more severe cases of the disease. The study, by researchers from Imperial College London, the Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and the Universita degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, is published today in a Special Issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, "Machine Learning techniques in Evolution and Ecology." Natural selection is the process by which beneficial gene mutations are preserved from generation to generation, until they become dominant in our genomes--the catalog of all our genes. One thing that can drive natural selection is protection against pathogens.

This paper introduces SuSketch, a design tool for first person shooter levels. SuSketch provides the designer with gameplay predictions for two competing players of specific character classes. The interface allows the designer to work side-by-side with an artificially intelligent creator and to receive varied types of feedback such as path information, predicted balance between players in a complete playthrough, or a predicted heatmap of the locations of player deaths. The system also proactively designs alternatives to the level and class pairing, and presents them to the designer as suggestions that improve the predicted balance of the game. SuSketch offers a new way of integrating machine learning into mixed-initiative co-creation tools, as a surrogate of human play trained on a large corpus of artificial playtraces. A user study with 16 game developers indicated that the tool was easy to use, but also highlighted a need to make SuSketch more accessible and more explainable.

Academic research in board game playing AI has of course moved While artificial intelligence has been applied to control players' beyond most pedestrian board games, applying a diverse set of decisions in board games for over half a century, little attention algorithms for playing card games with millions of card combinations is given to games with no player competition. Pandemic is an exemplar such as Magic: the Gathering (Wizards of the Coast, 1993) [3], collaborative board game where all players coordinate to games of tactical card placement such as Lords of War (Black Box, overcome challenges posed by events occurring during the game's 2012) [19] and Carcassonne (Hans im Glück, 2000) [9], card games progression. This paper proposes an artificial agent which controls of team-based competition such as Hanabi (Abacusspiele, 2010) [26] all players' actions and balances chances of winning versus risk or Codenames (Czech Games Edition, 2015) [22], and many more. of losing in this highly stochastic environment. The agent applies Traditional board games such as chess [15] and backgammon a Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithm on an abstraction of [23], as well as recent card games such as Race for the Galaxy (Rio the game-state that lowers the branching factor and simulates the Grande, 2007) [6] or digitized board games such as Hearthstone game's stochasticity. Results show that the proposed algorithm (Blizzard, 2014) [11, 18], focus on players competing to deplete another can find winning strategies more consistently in different games player's resources (pawns, hit points) or to accumulate more of varying difficulty.

One of the most important lessons from the success of deep learning is that learned representations tend to perform much better at any task compared to representations we design by hand. Yet evolution of evolvability algorithms, which aim to automatically learn good genetic representations, have received relatively little attention, perhaps because of the large amount of computational power they require. The recent method Evolvability ES allows direct selection for evolvability with little computation. However, it can only be used to solve problems where evolvability and task performance are aligned. We propose Quality Evolvability ES, a method that simultaneously optimizes for task performance and evolvability and without this restriction. Our proposed approach Quality Evolvability has similar motivation to Quality Diversity algorithms, but with some important differences. While Quality Diversity aims to find an archive of diverse and well-performing, but potentially genetically distant individuals, Quality Evolvability aims to find a single individual with a diverse and well-performing distribution of offspring. By doing so Quality Evolvability is forced to discover more evolvable representations. We demonstrate on robotic locomotion control tasks that Quality Evolvability ES, similarly to Quality Diversity methods, can learn faster than objective-based methods and can handle deceptive problems.

I could stridently insist that natural selection is the only way that complex life can evolve, but that's not strictly true. We can already design computers that can learn and reason and--almost--convince an observer that their behavior might be human. It's not unreasonable that in 100 or 200 years, our computer systems will be effectively sentient: human-like robots, similar to Star Trek's Commander Data. Alien civilizations that are considerably more advanced than us are likely already capable of such creations. The possibility--likelihood, even--of such robotic life has implications for our predictions about life on alien planets.