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Evolutionary Computation Bestiary

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Updated 2024-04-18

"Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent." -- Machado de Assis, The Psychiatrist.

Important note (2 June 2023): we do not endorse or recommend the use of any of the methods listed here. In fact, we find most if not all of them quite ridiculous, and in many cases a useless wste of space. If you send us a message asking to have your own recently-published paper included here, you are publicly acknowledging that you have absolutely no idea what you're doing with your academic life, and that you're too disctracted to even realise that we're making fun of you. You have been warned.

Introduction

The field of meta-heuristic search algorithms has a long history of finding inspiration in natural systems. Starting from classics such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization, the last two decades have witnessed a fireworks-style explosion (pun intended) of natural (and sometimes supernatural) heuristics - from Birds and Bees to Zombies and Reincarnation.

The goal of the Evolutionary Computation Bestiary is to catalog the, ermm... exuberance of the meta-heuristic "eco-system". We try to keep a list of the many different animals, plants, microbes, natural phenomena and supernatural activities that can be spotted in the wild lands of the metaphor-based computation literature.

While we personally believe that the literature could do with more mathematics and less marsupials, and that we, as a community, should grow past this metaphor-rich phase in our field's history (a bit like chemistry outgrew alchemy), please note that this list makes no claims about the scientific quality of the papers listed. The EC Bestiary puts classic works of the metaheuristics literature (e.g., GAs, ACO) and some that describe their methods in mostly metaphor-free language (e.g., JTF, CFO) side by side with others for which the scientific rigor is, to put it mildly, lacking. In short, it is not a Hall of Fame of algorithms - think of it more as The island of Doctor Moreau: a place with a few good creatures, but which are vastly outnumbered by mindless beasts.

Finally, if you know a metaphor-based method that is not listed here, or if you know of an earlier mention of a listed method, please see the bottom of the page on how to contribute!

The Bestiary

BioHeuristics GO

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Maintainers

("the Zoo Keepers")

Contributors

(at least one contribution to the bestiary - in terms of adding a method to the list, not inventing it!)

How to Contribute

If you know a paper that should belong to this list, please send an e-mail to either Claus or Felipe, or report an issue on our Github repo. The criteria for inclusion are quite simple:

  1. the work must be in a peer reviewed publication (journal or conference);
  2. the title or abstract must name the algorithm after the natural (or supernatural) metaphor on which it was based;

It is also important to highlight that only the earliest known mention for each metaphor is included.

More Info:

License:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license (Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike International License version 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/