Artificial Evolution 4th European Conference, AE'99 Dunkerque, France, November 3-5, 1999 Selected Papers

The Arti?cial Evolution conference was originally conceived as a forum for the French-speaking Evolutionary Computation community, but has of late been acquiring an European audience, with several papers from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain... However, AE remains as intended a small and friendly gathering, which will continue to be held every two years. Previous AE meets were held in Toulouse, Brest, and Nˆ ?mes. This year, the hosting was done by the LIL (Laboratoire d’Informatique du Littoral) in the not-so-cold city of Dunkerque. The invited talk on “Fitness Landscapes and Evolutionary Algorithms” was delivered by Colin Reeves of Coventry University This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference. Twenty-seven papers were presented orally at the conference, selected from over 40 papers refereed by the program committee. After the conference, each p- sentation was reviewed and 20 papers were retained and revised for publication in this volume. The papers in this volume have been grouped into the following ?ve sections which more or less re?ect the organization of the oral presentations. 1. Invited Paper: C. Reeves brightly describes the state of the art in Fitness Landscapes.

Invited Paper.- Fitness Landscapes and Evolutionary Algorithms.- Genetic Operators and Theoretical Models.- On the Effectivity of Evolutionary Algorithms for the Multidimensional Knapsack Problem.- Characterizing Locality in Decoder-Based EAs for the Multidimensional Knapsack Problem.- Evolutionary Case-Based Design.- Shorter Fitness Preserving Genetic Programs.- Modeling and Analysis of Genetic Algorithm with Tournament Selection.- Applications.- On Generating HTML Style Sheets with an Interactive Genetic Algorithm Based on Gene Frequencies.- Problem-Specific Representations for Heterogeneous Materials Design.- A Hybrid Evolution Strategy for Mixed Discrete Continuous Constrained Problems.- Lamarckian vs Darwinian Evolution for the Adaptation to Acoustical Environment Change.- From Hough to Darwin: An Individual Evolutionary Strategy Applied to Artificial Vision.- A New Genetic Algorithm for the Optimal Communication Spanning Tree Problem.- Agents - Cooperation.- Studies on Dynamics in the Classical Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with Few Strategies.- An Adaptive Agent Model for Generator Company Bidding in the UK Power Pool.- Evolution of Cooperation within a Behavior-Based Perspective: Confronting Nature and Animats.- Evolving Behavioural Animation Systems.- Heuristics - Outlooks.- Co-operative Improvement for a Combinatorial Optimization Algorithm.- Landscapes and the Maximal Constraint Satisfaction Problem.- Synthetic Neutrality for Artificial Evolution.- Two Evolutionary Approaches to Design Phase Plate for Tailoring Focal-Plane Irradiance Profile.- A Shepherd and a Sheepdog to Guide Evolutionary Computation?.