phi <philiphings...@gmail.com>

Hi everyone

I thought I would post a brief report on the recent CEC in Singapore.
It's brief because, unfortunately, I got a stomach bug early on in the
conference and had to spend the rest of the time close to my bathroom.
So I didn't get to many talks and missed out on catching up with lots
of people. If anyone else was there, maybe you could fill in some
gaps! Evan? Julian? Enyone?

I did manage to get to a couple of the keynote talks.

One was by Xin Yao: "A Rigorous Theoretical Framework for Measuring
Generalisation of Co-evolutionary Learning" . See
http://cec2007.nus.edu.sg/staticPages/plenary%20speakers.html#ARigorous
. This was a very good talk with some interesting new ideas.

Simon Lucas gave a talk about CI in games: "Games, and The Design of
New Hybrid Evolutionary and Temporal Difference Learning Algorithms".
Many of his examples used co-evolution. Actually, I chaired a special
session on CI in games. Of the 6 talks, 5 were about co-evolution
(mine was the only one that wasn't!) See
http://cec2007.nus.edu.sg/staticPages/plenary%20speakers.html#GamesAnd
for an abstract of Simon's talk.

Incidentally, no-one has so far responded to the suggestion of running
a Symposium on Co-evolution at the next SSCI - fair enough, it would
be a major exercise. It would be a good way to broaden the audience
for co-evolutionary theory though - there was a lot of interchange of
people between the different symposia at SSCI in Hawaii - more than
at, say, a WCCI.

But how about a special session on co-evolution at WCCI in Hong Kong
next year? Any takers for that? The workload for a special session is
not that high and it is quite straightforward to run one.

regards, phi