Graduate Groups
Graduate groups at CSE
Evolving Cellular Automata
The EvCA Project is no longer active, although many other groups now work on evolving cellular automata. A simple web search will take you to these other projects. Nonetheless, this site continues to provide access to the work produced by the EvCA group.
The overall research done by the EvCA group was primarily motivated by the question: "How does evolution produce sophisticated emergent computation in systems composed of simple components limited to local interactions?" To find answers to this question, genetic algorithms were used to evolve cellular automata to perform computational tasks that require global information processing. In studying the results of these computer simulations, many more, related questions sprung up, ranging from questions about the relation between pattern formation and information processing to questions about population dynamics and coevolution. Follow the links in the list below to find out more about these research projects, and how they relate to each other.
Dynamics of Learning
The Dynamics of Learning project is a Computational Science and Engineering Center research initiative that seeks to understand the process of learning using techniques from statistical mechanics, dynamical systems, and computation theory.
Computational Mechanics
The label computational mechanics is simply meant to indicate an extension of the approaches typically found in statistical mechanics. That is, we are concerned with more detailed structural aspects of behavior than those captured solely in terms of probability and degrees of randomness.
Rundle Group
Our group focuses on developing the theoretical and computational methods needed to understand these classes of driven, non-equilibrium threshold systems. We are particularly interested in developing the computational tools necessary to simulate these high-dimensional complex systems within the context of modern, web-based, high performance computing methods using Beowulf clusters and other types of parallel, SMP machines. We view the development of the emergent, Semantic Grid as a particulary promising technology, and we are pursuing the development of emergent computational paradigms. Computational simulations thus represent a major tool and a major focus of our research. Much of our work is concerned with a particularly important threshold system in nature, earthquake fault systems.