July 16, 2000 

2000 Congress on EC Opens with Checkers Challenge

La Jolla, CA - The 2000 Congress on Evolutionary Computation opened today at the La Jolla Marriott Hotel. The Congress is one of the world's leading international conferences on evolutionary algorithms and is sponsored jointly by the IEEE Neural Networks Council, the IEE from the United Kingdom, and the Evolutionary Programming Society. One of the spotlighted events at the Congress is the Checkers Challenge, organized by Dr. David B. Fogel and Kumar Chellapilla of Natural Selection, Inc.^Ò

Over the course of six months, Dr. Fogel and Mr. Chellapilla used an evolutionary algorithm to evolve a neural network that can play an expert-level game of checkers. Dr. Fogel is offering a $100 cash prize to the first person at the Congress who can defeat the neural network. One of the noteworthy aspects of Dr. Fogel and Mr. Chellapilla's research was that the neural networks involved in the evolutionary competition were only given knowledge of the type, location, and number of pieces on the checker board at any given time. No human expertise was offered to the neural networks in terms of other features that people rely on when playing at the highest levels of competition. Nevertheless, the best-evolved neural network has proved to hold its own with human experts.

"This technology can be applied to discovering, or even inventing, relevant patterns in other data," offered Dr. Fogel. "We can use an evolutionary approach to mine vast quantities of data for interesting features, even ones that other people might not have thought about." Natural Selection, Inc.® is exploring the use of evolutionary algorithms and neural networks in a variety of industrial, medical, and defense applications.

Natural Selection, Inc.^Ò was founded in 1993 to address complex problems in industry, medicine, and defense. The company possesses unique expertise in computational intelligence techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, and fuzzy logic. The corporation's research efforts support the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, the automated detection and diagnosis of breast cancer from film-screen mammograms, optical character recognition, and a variety of military and industrial projects.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. David B. Fogel,
Executive Vice President & Chief Scientist,
Natural Selection, Inc.,
3333 N. Torrey Pines Ct.,
Suite 200,
La Jolla, CA, 92037
tel: (619) 455-6449
fax: (619) 455-1560
dfogel@natural-selection.com

and please visit our web site at http://www.natural-selection.com/.