Interactive Evolution

Creative design and search strategies by computers is difficult; objective functions can be hard to define and subjective. Worse, users do not always know what they are are looking for. Interactive Evolution keeps humans in the loop by allowing them to guide an evolutionary search process.

For example, an artistic quality such as a sound or image can be evolved by simply asking the user to iteratively select the one that is most interesting. Data mining can be improved by allowing a user to interact with data mapping functions.

We have created several projects that allow users to design airplanes within sets of constraints, explore highly dimensional data, and even creating sound from data.

For further details:

S. Malinchik, B. Orme, J. Rothermich, E. Bonabeau (2004) Interactive Exploratory Data Analysis, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ.