July 25, 2000

Neural Checkers Player Featured in NY Times

La Jolla, CA - Dr. David Fogel and Kumar Chellapilla of Natural Selection, Inc.^Ò are featured in today's New York Times, which details their development of a neural network that plays an expert-level game of checkers. The neural network wasn't designed by human experts, but rather was evolved by a process of random variation and selection, where the neural networks competed for survival by demonstrating their prowess at playing the game. "We started by giving the neural network only the basic information about the rules of the game and the fact that there are different types of pieces, their location, and the number of pieces. After that, the evolutionary process had to extract the information that it needed to play well simply by playing the game," said Fogel. The article in the New York Times, written by James Glanz, is being picked up by other newspapers around the United States and internationally. For more information on Fogel and Chellapilla's evolutionary program for playing checkers, please email Dr. Fogel at dfogel@natural-selection.com.

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/.