Evolutionary Computation in Gene Regulatory Network Research

CHAPTER 1A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO EVOLUTIONARY AND OTHER NATURE-INSPIRED ALGORITHMS

Nasimul Noman

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, The University of Newcastle, New South Wales, AustraliaandThe Priority Research Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine, The University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Hitoshi Iba

Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan

1.1 INTRODUCTION

When we look at nature, everything seems to be working very systematically. All natural phenomena, ranging from molecular level to ecological level, and from individual level to population level, are functioning effectively. The flawless operation of various natural systems becomes possible due to some underlying governing rules.

From the beginning of human history, people have borrowed ideas and mimicked different natural processes in solving their daily-life problems. With the progress of civilization, we started to analyze and understand the basic laws and fundamental mechanisms behind natural phenomena and imitate those in designing artificial systems. With the beginning of information era, researchers started to investigate these natural processes from the perspective of information processing. We started to mimic how information is stored, processed, and transferred in natural systems ...