Colin G. Johnson

Jerry Swan, Steven Adriaensen, Alexander E. I. Brownlee et al.

Following decades of sustained improvement, metaheuristics are one of the great success stories of optimization research. However, in order for research in metaheuristics to avoid fragmentation and a lack of reproducibility, there is a pressing need for stronger scientific and computational infrastructure to support the development, analysis and comparison of new approaches. We argue that, via principled choice of infrastructure support, the field can pursue a higher level of scientific enquiry. We describe our vision and report on progress, showing how the adoption of common protocols for all metaheuristics can help liberate the potential of the field, easing the exploration of the design space of metaheuristics.

Fabio Paolizzo, Colin G. Johnson

Interactive music systems always exhibit some autonomy in the creative process. The capacity to generate novel material while retaining mutuality to the interaction is proposed here as the bare minimum for creative autonomy in such systems. Video Interactive VST Orchestra is a system incorporating an adaptive technique based both on the concept of salience as a means for retaining mutuality to the interplay and on multidominance in the adaptive generation process as a means for introducing novelty. We call this property reflexive multidominance. A case study providing evidence of such creative autonomy in VIVO is presented.