Evolution is Nature's design process. The natural world is full of wonderful examples of its successes, from engineering design feats such as powered flight, to the design of complex optical systems such as the mammalian eye, to the merely stunningly beautiful designs of orchids or birds of paradise. With increasing computational power, we are now able to simulate this process with greater fidelity, combining complex simulations with high-performance evolutionary algorithms to tackle problems that used to be impractical.

This book showcases the state of the art in evolutionary algorithms for design. The chapters are organized by experts in the following fields: evolutionary design and "intelligent design" in biology, art, computational embryogeny, and engineering. The book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and graduate students in natural computing, engineering design, biology and the creative arts.

Inhalt
Biology.- Evolutionary Design in Biology.- Intelligent Design and Evolutionary Computation.- Inference of Genetic Networks Using an Evolutionary Algorithm.- Synthetic Biology: Life, Jim, but Not As We Know It.- Dancing with Swarms: Utilizing Swarm Intelligence to Build, Investigate, and Control Complex Systems.- Art.- Evolutionary Design in Art.- Natural Processes and Artificial Procedures.- Evolutionary Exploration of Complex Fractals.- Evolving the Mandelbrot Set to Imitate Figurative Art.- Evolutionary L-systems.- Embryogeny.- Evolutionary Design in Embryogeny.- Embryogenesis of Artificial Landscapes.- On Form and Function: The Evolution of Developmental Control.- Modularity in a Computational Model of Embryogeny.- Engineering.- Evolutionary Design in Engineering.- Engineering Optimization Using Evolutionary Algorithms: A Case Study on Hydro-thermal Power Scheduling.- Multimodal Function Optimization of Varied-Line-Spacing Holographic Grating.- GPBG: A Framework for Evolutionary Design of Multi-domain Engineering Systems Using Genetic Programming and Bond Graphs.