UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

     
	               "Evolutionary Robustness"
	

                   Prof. W. B. Langdon,
                (University College London)

                        11 March 2025
                         13:00 -14:00 
                          Room C408

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend
		 Refreshments will be provided
				  
				                               

Abstract: 

Even in stable conditions life can retain its ability for continued
evolutionary improvement for more than 80,000 generations.
Instead of 38 years, Genetic Programming (GP) experiments can be run
to a million generations in a few weeks.

Information theory explains why genetic programming populations converge
and why the rate of fitness improvement falls
as huge evolved programs become more robust to crossover.

Mutation testing of large C++ programs shows
that real software can also be robust to many source code changes.
As with genetic programming, there is a tendency for deeply nested
code to be more robust.

For sustained innovation, we suggest architectures composed of many
small evolvable units which are intimate with their environment, so
that the impact of crossovers and mutations has only a short way to
travel before impacting fitness.


Biography:

Bill Langdon is an Honorary Research Professor in the CREST group
in  University College London's Computer Science department.

He has extensive expertise in Genetic Programming
(including three books on Genetic Programming),
and more recently Genetic Improvement.
He has done post docs and made research visits
to Holland (CWI, La Poutre, Vitanyi),
Germany (Wolfgang Banzhaf),
Sweden (Peter Nordin) and Canada
as well as the UK (Birmingham Uni, Essex Uni,
King's College London, and University College London).

Before returning to university, Bill worked for 13 years in industry
(real time control, pipelines, office automation, networking).



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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
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