Metaheuristics Tutorial

This is a set of lecture notes for an undergraduate class on metaheuristics. The first version of the notes was written for a course that the author taught in Spring of 2009. As these are lecture notes for an undergraduate class on the topic, which is unusual, these notes have certain traits. First, they’re informal and contain a number of his own personal biases and misinformation. Second, they are light on theory and examples: they’re mostly descriptions of algorithms and hand wavy, intuitive explanations about why and where you’d want to use them. Third, they’re chock full of algorithms great and small. I think these notes would best serve as a complement to a textbook, but can also stand alone as rapid introduction to the field. Complete Book.

The Mona Lisa, estimated with the (5+1) Evolution Strategy. The objective is to find a set of fifty polygons which most closely approximates the original image. After Roger Alsing.