FOGA

FOGA, the ACM SIGEVO Workshop on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, started in 1990 and has, in the past 25 years, established itself as the premier event in the theory of all kinds of randomized search heuristics. Its latest installment, the 13th of its kind, is no exception.

FOGA 2015 is special not only because of the quarter of a century anniversary but also because it is the first FOGA to take place in the United Kingdom. Four organizers from all parts of Great Britain joined forces to bring the event to Aberystwyth in Wales. We had 27 participants from seven countries from four continents of the world. They brought with them 16 presentations for accepted papers, carefully selected from 26 submissions. An hour was allocated for each of the presentations to allow ample time to discuss ideas and inspect details. Following the FOGA tradition all papers have undergone another round of reviewing and rewriting after being presented and passionately discussed at the workshop. This ensures that what you find in these postproceedings is the best and best polished current research in the field.

The presented papers cover many topics of current research in theory of evolutionary algorithms and other randomized search heuristics. This includes discussion of their limits and potentials, either from the perspective of black-box complexity (Golnaz Badkobeh, Per Kristian Lehre, Dirk Sudholt: Black-box complexity of parallel search with distributed populations; Thomas Jansen: On the black-box complexity of example functions: the real jump function) or from the perspective of adversarial optimization (Alan Lockett: Insights from adversarial fitness functions). A very important aspect of current research are investigations of the performance of specific evolutionary algorithms on specific problems or problem classes. Such work includes further investigations of the very well-known and simple (1+1) evolutionary algorithm (Timo Kötzing, Andrei Lissovoi, Carsten Witt: (1+1) EA on generalized dynamic OneMax; Johannes Lengler, Nick Spooner: Fixed budget performance of the (1+1) EA on linear functions), studies of the performance of evolutionary algorithms when confronted with noisy problems (Duc-Cuong Dang, Per-Kristian Lehre: Efficient optimization of noisy fitness functions with population-based evolutionary algorithms; Adam Prügel-Bennett, Jonathan Rowe, Jonathan Shapiro: Run-time analysis of population-based algorithms in noisy environments; Sandra Astete-Morales, Marie-Liesse Cauwet, Olivier Teytaud: Evolution strategies with additive noise: a convergence rate lower bound), studies of parallel evolutionary algorithms (Eric Scott, Kenneth De Jong: Understanding simple asynchronous evolutionary algorithms; Marie-Liesse Cauwet, Shih-Yuan Chiu, Kuo-Min Lin, David Saint-Pierre, Fabien Teytaud, Olivier Teytaud, Shi-Jim Yen: Parallel evolutionary algorithms performing pairwise comparisons) and studies concerned with improving the performance of evolutionary algorithms in applications (Mathys C. Du Plessis, Andries Engelbrecht, Andre Calitz: Self-adapting the Brownian radius in a differential evolution algorithm for dynamic environments; Oswin Krause, Christian Igel: A more efficient rank-one covariance matrix update for evolution strategies; Renato Tinos, Darrell Whitley, Francisco Chicano: Partition crossover for pseudo-Boolean optimization). FOGA also remains the best place to present fundamental observations about the way evolutionary algorithms work (Luigi Malagò, Giovanni Pistone: Information geometry of the Gaussian distribution in view of stochastic optimization; Keki Burjorjee: Hypomixability elimination in evolutionary systems) as well as studies of other complex systems like co-adapting agents (Richard Mealing, Jonathan Shapiro: Convergence of strategies in simple co-adapting games). We are confident that every reader with an interest in theory of randomized search heuristics will find something that he or she finds interesting, challenging and inspiring.

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth provided a splendid setting not only for the talks presenting the accepted submissions but also for our invited talk, presented by Professor Leslie Ann Goldberg from the University of Oxford, who gave an inspiring overview of evolutionary dynamics in graphs in the form of the Moran process. On Sunday, when the National Library is closed, the Department of Computer Science of Aberystwyth University kindly donated a seminar room and we are thankful for the support.