Syllabus for CS 499 - Nature-Inspired Computation

De Jong

Spring 2011

Tuesday, 4:30-7:10pm

Prerequisites: CS 480 and CS 483, or permission of the instructor.

Textbook: Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, D. Floreano and C. Mattiussi, MIT Press, 2008.

This course will be a survey of the emerging field of Natural Computation, i.e. computational systems inspired by systems found in nature. Topics to be covered will include but not be limited to:

• Evolutionary Algorithms
• Ant Colony Algorithms
• Swarm Intelligence
• Immune System Algorithms
• Cellular Automata
• Lindenmeyer Systems
• Artificial Neural Networks
• Simulated Annealing

This will be a programming-oriented course in which students will be expected to read and modify standard versions of existing algorithms. There will be a series of computational homework assignments, a class project, and a final exam.