Natural Selection, Inc.^® Celebrates 10 Years of Excellence  

La Jolla, CA -- With the start of the new year, Natural Selection, Inc.^® is proud to mark the completion of its first 10 years of operations. In 1993, Larry, David, and Eva Fogel formed the woman-owned small business to help solve challenging problems in industry, medicine, and defense. With a core competence including evolutionary computation, neural networks, statistical analysis, and a proprietary method of developing quantitative statements of mission objections, known as the Valuated State Space™ Approach, Natural Selection, Inc. has expanded over this period, increasing annual revenues five-fold while growing to employ 15 scientists and support staff currently.

"I'm very pleased to mark this milestone in our corporate history," remarked Dr. David Fogel, CEO of Natural Selection, Inc. "We've created many successful applications across diverse areas, including cutting-edge real-world successes in biotechnology and defense." Natural Selection, Inc. has supported Fortune 500 companies in scheduling and other business optimization opportunities, as well as contributed to the development of state-of-the-art pharmaceutical design software and combat mission planning algorithms for the Department of Defense.

In 1997, Natural Selection, Inc. was recognized in a Business Week survey as one of the top 25 institutions internationally in the area of biologically-inspired algorithms, and was the fifth choice of members of scientific community who were asked if they were 35 years old "and had just won the first Nobel Prize for Information Technology, triggering invitations to any lab of your choice, which one would you pick?" Natural Selection, Inc. was the only corporation so named, with other universities and research institutes completing the top four positions. Since then, Natural Selection, Inc. has branched out in other areas, including assisting Internet start-up companies, and the development of its sister corporation, Digenetics, Inc., which is devoted to applying evolutionary computing technology to entertainment products.

Digenetics, Inc. launched its first product, "Checkers with an Attitude," in December of 2001 following the release of Dr. David Fogel's popular science book "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI" (Morgan Kaufmann). The book describes research sponsored in part by Natural Selection, Inc. in which a computer taught itself to play checkers at the level of human experts without relying on preprogrammed human expertise. This research has been featured in the journal Nature, newspapers such as the New York Times and Le Monde, and was even the source of a question on the television game show Jeopardy!. Digenetics, Inc. will shortly be releasing its next product, "Chess with an Attitude," which similarly offers the player a chance to compete against truly intelligent video characters at different levels of competition, all the way from novice to senior master.

Within the past year, Natural Selection, Inc. has supported or continues to support all major branches of the Department of Defense, including the Transportation Security Agency, teaming on a grant from MARAD to investigate the use of computational intelligence techniques for virtually screening every container on ships destined for the United States as part of the Global Container Profiling Project. Natural Selection, Inc. also continues to assist in the development of new pharmaceuticals, and recently teamed on a key publication with researchers from Isis Pharmaceuticals that appeared in the prestigious journal Nucleic Acids Research. “We’ve grown recently with some key acquisitions of technical staff, and I’m very positive about our future prospects and the impact that we can make in the key areas of industry, medicine, and security as we enter our next decade of operations,” said Dr. David Fogel.

Natural Selection, Inc.^® 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
Chief Executive Officer
Natural Selection, Inc.
3333 N. Torrey Pines Ct.
Suite 200
La Jolla, CA, 92037
tel: (858) 455-6449
fax: (858) 455-1560
dfogel [at] natural-selection.com