July 18, 2000 

Evolved Neural Network Goes Undefeated at 2000 Congress on EC

La Jolla, CA - Dr. David Fogel, executive vice president and chief scientist of Natural Selection, Inc.^Ò , reports that he has now played 18 games against registrants at the 2000 Congress on Evolutionary Computation with his evolved neural network checkers player and that the program remains undefeated. Dr. Fogel is offering a $100 cash prize to the first person who is registered at the conference to beat the program.

"We ran a great experiment during the lunch session today," Dr. Fogel remarked. "We had 18 people decide collectively which move to make against the machine. They could take as long as they liked. Thirty minutes later, the computer had won again." The $100 prize is only being offered for head-to-head competition, but the contest between the evolved neural network and this large group garnered a lot of interest from the lunch-time spectators.

"There's still one more day to go on the Checkers Challenge," said Dr. Fogel. "We'll see if anyone can earn the $100 prize tomorrow. So far, Professor Edmund Burke of the University of Nottingham has given the program the best challenge, playing it to a draw. Nobody else has really come close yet."

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/.