Natural Selection, Inc.

July 18, 2006

Dr. David Fogel Gives Invited Lecture on Blondie24 at 2006 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation

Vancouver, Canada - Dr. David Fogel, CEO of Natural Selection, Inc., presented an invited lecture in the special session on evolutionary computation and games, held as part of the 2006 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. His lecture, titled "All About Blondie," reviewed the development of the Blondie24 checkers program that taught itself to play at the level of a human expert, as well as the Blondie25 program that continues today to learn to play chess at the level of grandmasters. Dr. Fogel's book, Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI, can be obtained here.

"This was a fun talk to give, as I was able to share some of the 'behind-the-scenes' developments of Blondie24, as well as the latest Blondie25 results with the conference participants," said Dr. Fogel. The 2006 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation had a record 792 submissions and was held as part of the 2006 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, which is a joint meeting of the aforementioned Congress, and the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks and the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems. Over 1650 people attended the World Congress.

The World Congress is sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, along with the International Neural Network Society, the Evolutionary Programming Society, and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society also sponsors a series of symposia, including the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games, which will be held for the third time in April, 2007 (see www.ieee-ssci.org) in Honolulu, Hawaii. "Judging by the level of interest in computational intelligence and games at the meeting in Vancouver, it's clear that this is going to be one of the most rapidly expanding areas of computational intelligence research in the coming years," said Dr. Fogel. "It will be truly fun to see what new developments in games come from this community."

For more information, please contact:

Dr. David B. Fogel
CEO
Natural Selection, Inc.
3333 N. Torrey Pines Ct.
Suite 200
La Jolla, CA, 92037
tel: (858) 455-6449
fax: (858) 455-1560
dfogel@natural-selection.com

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