Evolutionary computation comes of age

Evolutionary computation is a field of study of computational systems which uses ideas and gets inspirations from natural evolution and adaptation. Although the history of evolutionary computation can be traced back to 1950s, it was only in the last decade or so that the field started to grow rapidly. In recent years, there have been many successful applications of various evolutionary computation techniques in artificial intelligence, machine learning, numerical optimization, combinatorial optimization, etc. The theory of evolutionary computation has also been enriched greatly. There is a much better understanding of why and how evolutionary computation techniques work (or do not work) than five or six years ago. This article reports some of the latest developments presented at the recent 1999 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC '99). © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.