[ Interesting ] Evolution and Genetic Algorithms

Evolution, baby!

Recently, I become interested in evolution and I kept thinking about the famous Darvin's theory. Does it really explain, how the chameleon evolved so that its tongue reaches twice the size of its body(!?) , how the necks of the giraffe evolved to be so long, how do some types of snakes grew larger teeth to contain more poison, how did the dolphins in the amazon evolved to use echolocation instead of sight and also use this echolocation signals to paralyze some type of fish and many other various examples from the animal kingdom that I cannot explain through evolution. For example, if the chameleon tongue grew little by little, in the beginning it was of no use to it and thus evolution should not have favored this mutation.

In the next few months, I intend to spend some time on researching the biological side of evolution. In the meantime, I looked over the computer science side of evolution. There is a nice set of algorithms that base their idea on evolution. These genetic algorithms aim at reaching a good solution to NP-hard optimization problems. Today, I read a few tutorials on the subject that I would like to share:

• A basic tutorial with examples http://cs.felk.cvut.cz/~xobitko/ga/
• More research oriented descriptions can be found at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html and http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/holland.GAIntro.htm
• A very nice demonstration with various possibilities http://math.hws.edu/xJava/GA/
• A c++ library for genetic algorithm components http://lancet.mit.edu/ga/ (i didn't look at how useful is it)

I hope this topic raises some comments... :)