Keynote Talk
Title: Co-evolutionary Learning of Game-playing Strategies
Speaker: Xin Yao, University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract:
The iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) game has been used extensively in modelling various
real-world situations. This talk is concerned with the evolutionary approach to learning strategies for
playing the IPD game. Firstly, we generalise the game from the classical 2 player case to N (N>2)
players and investigate the impact of the group size on the evolution. Secondly, we study a more
realistic IPD game where more than two levels of cooperations are allowed. Surprisingly, more
choices appear to discourage cooperation among players. Possible reasons for this are discussed.
Thirdly, we introduce reputation into the IPD game and study its impact on the evolution of
cooperation. It turns out that the reputation of a player is an important factor in encouraging
cooperative behaviours. Finally, if time permits, a vigorous theoretical framework is presented for
measuring the generalisation of co-evolutionary learning quantitatively.
Biography:
Xin Yao is a Professor (Chair) of Computer Science at the University of
Birmingham, UK. He obtained his BSc from the University of Science and
Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, China, in 1982, MSc from the North
China Institute of Computing Technology in Beijing, China, in 1985, and PhD
from USTC in Hefei, China, in 1990.
He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National
University (ANU) in Canberra in 1990-91 and at CSIRO Division of Building,
Construction and Engineering in Melbourne in 1991-92. He was a lecturer,
senior lecturer and an associate professor at the University College, the
University of New South Wales (UNSW), the Australian Defence Force
Academy (ADFA) in Canberra in 1992-99. Attracted by the English weather, he
moved to Birmingham on the April's Fool day in 1999 to take up a Chair of Computer Science.
Currently he is the Director of CERCIA (the Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational
Intelligence and Applications, http://www.cercia.ac.uk) at the University of Birmingham, UK, which is
specialised in applied research and knowledge transfer. He is an IEEE Fellow and a Distinguished
Lecturer of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He won the 2001 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize
Paper Award and several other best paper awards. He was a Cheung Kong Scholar (Changjian Chair
Professor) of the Ministry of Education of China, a Distinguished Visiting Professor (Grand Master
Chair Professorship) of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, China, and a
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Yuan Ze University, Chung-Li, Taiwan. In his spare time, he did
the voluntary work as the editor-in-chief (2003-08) of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary
Computation, and still is an associate editor or editorial board member of 12 international journals,
and the editor of the World Scientific book series on "Advances in Natural Computation". He has been
invited to give more than 50 keynote and plenary speeches at conferences in 16+ different countries.
His major research interests include evolutionary computation, neural network ensembles, and
their applications in optimisation, data mining and creative design. He has more than 300 refereed
publications in journals and conferences.