• Calendar

November 15, Tuesday
12:00 – 13:30

The current state of the art in the development of search methodologies is focused around the design of bespoke systems, which are specifically tailored to a particular situation or organisation.Such bespoke systems are necessarily created by human experts, and so they are relatively expensive. Some of the research at the ASAP research group, at the University of Nottingham, is concerned with how to build intelligent systems which are capable of automatically building new systems. In other words to automate some of the creative process, to make it less expensive by being less reliant on human expertise. In this talk, I will present some work we have recently published on the automatic design of heuristics, particularly for two dimensional stock cutting problems. The research shows that genetic programming can be used to evolve novel heuristics which are at least as good as human designed heuristics for this problem. Research into the automatic design of heuristics could represent a change in the role of the human expert, from designing a heuristic methodology, to designing a search space within which a good heuristic methodology is likely to exist. The computer then takes on the more tedious task of searching that space, while we can focus on the creative aspect of designing it.