CS 695  Topics in CS:  Metaheuristics

Fall 2007

Wednesday, 4:30-7:10pm, 206 Innovation Hall

Instructor:     Kenneth De Jong                 993-1530

                411 Science & Tech II           kdejong@gmu.edu

Prerequisites:  CS 580 and CS 583, or permission of the instructor.

Text book: (recommended, but not required)

       Modern Heuristic Search Methods, V.J. Rayward-Smith, et al.

This course will serve as an introduction to and a comprehensive survey of the field

of metaheuristics.  The course will cover in some detail the main paradigms, including

evolutionary computation, simulated annealing, tabu search, ant colony algorithms and 

particle swarm methods.  These metaheuristics will be studied both empirically and 

theoretically with the goal of understanding their usefulness for a variety of problem 

domains including function optimization, combinatorial optimization, and machine learning.

There will be regular homework assignments, primarily computational in nature and will 

involve programming.  A final term project will be required.