Dateline: July 11, Philadelphia, USA.
At the 2012 GECCO conference, Humies 2012 judges awarded 3 medals and 2 citations of honorable mention among a field of 10 finalists. The judges commented that the high quality of the entrants as well as the diversity in the nature of their achievements taxed their decision making process.
Michael Dewey-Vogt, Stephanie Forrest, Claire Le Goues and Westley Weimer of the University of New Mexico and of the University of Virginia, USA won the Bronze Award in the 2012 Humies Competition.
They developed GenProg, a software tool that can detects and repair bugs automatically in C code using Genetic Programming. GenProg was able to repair more than half of 105 defects from 8 open-source programs totalling 5.1 millions lines of code.
Richard A.J. Woolley, Julian Stirling, Philip Moriarty, Natalio Krasnogor and Adrian Radocea of the University of Nottingham, UK won the Silver Award in the 2012 Humies Competition. A Cellular Genetic Algorithm has been successfully used to help the physicists during the tuning of their scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), the Noble prize winning invention that gives access to atom-scale images and manipulations. Not only does the GA save hours of tedious trial-and-error by the experts, but it also improves the quality of the resulting images.
There is a new board game called Yavalath grabbing the attention of the gaming world. While it has the simplicity of tic-tac-toe, Yavalath also possesses the complexity of much deeper games, and is ranked higher than popular games like Backgammon and Chinese Checkers in the BoardGameGeek database. What may be most interesting about Yavalath, though, is that a computer designed the game using standard genetic programming techniques.
DaE is an evolutionary AI planner. DaE slices the planning problem at hand into (hopefully simpler) problems by evolving a sequence of intermediate states, and relies upon a 'standard' planner to solve each of the sub-problems in turn.
DaE won the Silver Medal at the 2010 Humies Competition for having obtained the state-of-the-art results in the 3 main categories of planning problems (classical STRIP problems, problems with cost, and temporal problems). DaE also won the Deterministic Temporal Satisficing track during the IPC7 (International Planning Competition) in 2011.