ECE 457A - Artificial and Natural Intelligence

The course starts by addressing the ill-structured problems and need for computational intelligence methods. It introduces the concepts of heuristics and their use in conjunction with search methods, solving problems using heuristics and metaheuristics, constraints satisfaction. The course also introduces the concepts of co-operation and adaptations and how they are influencing new methods for solving complex problems. The course starts by illustrating how the concepts of co-operation and adaptation are manifested in nature and how such models are inspiring new types of solutions methods. Topics to be covered include search algorithms, game playing, constraints satisfaction, meta-heuristics, evolutionary computing methods, swarm intelligence, ant-colony algorithms, particle swarm methods, adaptive and learning algorithms and the use of these algorithms in solving continuous and discrete problems that arise in engineering applications.