SIGEVOlution - Volume 7 Issue 1

EDITORIAL Editorial G ECCO-2015 was great as usual and Vancouver was an amazing venue. Great hotel, excellent nearby restaurants. And what about the weather huh? Sunny, clear sky, hot but not too hot. In other words, perfect. Dirk Arnold, Christian Igel, and their team did an amazing job. They surely raised the bar for the next GECCO organizers! Before leaving for vacation, I am very happy to bring you the first issue of the new volume. As I anticipated during the SIGEVO meeting, the newsletter is four issues behind but we will try to catch up by April 2015 which would put us right on schedule. But to succeed we need your help. So, if you have EC applications that you wish to showcase to a broader audience, if you just published new Master or PhD theses, if you want to let our community know how your workshop or your conference turned out, if you have new EC software available, if you have a lab (like BEACON) that you wish to advertise, just drop me an email. In this issue we have a new article by James McDermott about an approach to visualize evolution and an article by the winners of the Virtual Creatures Competition, Nick Cheney, Robert MacCurdy, Jeff Clune and Hod Lipson, who — as you may guess — provided the images for the nice cover. The issue continues with the presentation of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action and William Raffe's new PhD thesis. At the end, the usual rich list of forthcoming events. U nderstanding the structure of search spaces can help us to design better search algorithms, and it is natural to try to understand search spaces by visualising them. For typical evolutionary search spaces, like the space of genetic programming trees, visualising them directly is impossible, because of their large dimensionality. However, we can use the idea of distances on search spaces to project them into two dimensions, expose their structure, and obtain useful and attractive visualisations.