Talk:Evolutionary computation

Merge

Why are there 2 pages for this? There is Evolutionary Computation and Evolutionary computation They should be merged. JockoJonson 20:44, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Previously redirected to evolutionary algorithm, I saw it fit to define the distinction. --moxon 11:42, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

EC is not synonymous with EA

What happened to this article? As the original contributor says, EC is not synonymous with evolutionary algorithms. It's broader. The article should probably revert to 17:51, 28 February 2007, unless anyone has a better plan. --Michael Allan 17:06, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Reversion because of alleged copyright refringement

Dear Oli,

I followed wikipedia's copyright policy, but could not see which part of my revision refringed copyright. It must be very easy for you to spot - i wonder if you'd be kind enough to spare a minute to point out which part to me, please? Appreciated.

The author of the page http://userweb.elec.gla.ac.uk/y/yunli/ga_demo/ga_demo.htm has donated its copyright:

"Copyleft: The text of this webpage is available for modification and reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License." ieee (talk) 20:10, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Evolutionary computation navigation box template

Please view the new evolutionary computation navigation box template: Template: Evolutionary computation. Feel free to help organize and add topics, and place the template

at the end of listed articles. Thanks. TheProfessor (talk) 21:38, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

This is great! Based on information in the article I would add more Journals and Meetings (called conferences in the article, appropriately, I am following the usage in the Bionformatics template, maybe not ideal here) as well as Organisations. I suggest that there are three organisations that are most important (the third a sub-group of the first): ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), IEEE and ACM SIGEVO (no page as yet but given the information here maybe it should be created.) Worramlaup21 (talk) 17:40, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

I have added some of the links that I referred to. Others will need improvements to the linked articles. Worramlaup21 (talk) 15:34, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

The relationship between evolutionary computation and evolutionary biology

This comprehensive article covers the origin, development and recent activities in the field of evolutionary computation. But from the introduction onwards (quoting the first sentence in full): Evolutionary computation from computer science is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the subfield of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms.

It refers to a very wide range of algorithms, their origins and the practictioners who developed them, leading to an extremely broad list of techniques, which through further investigation could probably be expanded today. Later on it refers to notable practitioners, journals and conferences before linking to other related articles not covered in detail here. What is common to all of this? As referred to in the first sentence, it is almost entirely carried out by computer scientists or engineers. Even though they may be (and should be) inspired by biological evolution, almost none of them are evolutionary biologists. Meanwhile evolutionary biologists carry out research in evolutionary biology, almost entirely not using the algorithms available in evolutionary computation, not publishing in evolutionary computation journals nor attending evolutionary computation conferences. (There are of course a lot of evolutionary biology journals and conferences corrrectly not referred to in this article.)

The section Evolutionary algorithms and biology departs in an interesting strand from most of the rest of the article, but how valid is it without considering the relationship between Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) in its current molecular form and the computational resources needed to carry out evolutionary computation? And who wrote "The most promising ideas about program-development parallels seem to us to be ones that point to an apparently close analogy between processes within cells, and the low-level operation of modern computers" in this section (should not be written in the first person)?

In conclusion, a great article, but extremely questionable from the material included (correctly) in it in having a high or even low relationship to evolutionary biology. I expect many computer scientists and evolutionary biologists would agree because they don't tend to work together.

What does the Wikipedia community behind this article and articles on related algorithms think? I will not edit without feedback, but if there is a consensus I would suggest removing the link to the Evolutionary Biology Template. Worramlaup21 (talk) 18:44, 4 September 2025 (UTC)