Computational Intelligence: Collaboration, Fusion and Emergence

This book is about synergy in computational intelligence (CI). It is a c- lection of chapters that covers a rich and diverse variety of computer-based techniques, all involving some aspect of computational intelligence, but each one taking a somewhat pragmatic view. Many complex problems in the real world require the application of some form of what we loosely call “intel- gence”fortheirsolution. Few can be solved by the naive application of a single technique, however good it is. Authors in this collection recognize the li- tations of individual paradigms, and propose some practical and novel ways in which different CI techniques can be combined with each other, or with more traditional computational techniques, to produce powerful probl- solving environments which exhibit synergy, i. e. , systems in which the whole 1 is greater than the sum of the parts . Computational intelligence is a relatively new term, and there is some d- agreement as to its precise definition. Some practitioners limit its scope to schemes involving evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic, or hybrids of these. For others, the definition is a little more flexible, and will include paradigms such as Bayesian belief networks, multi-agent systems, case-based reasoning and so on. Generally, the term has a similar meaning to the well-known phrase “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), although CI is p- ceived moreas a “bottom up” approachfrom which intelligent behaviour can emerge, whereas AI tends to be studied from the “topdown”, and derive from pondering upon the “meaning of intelligence”. (These and other key issues will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 1.