background: although visual impairment of drivers is a very important risk factor for car accident, a few published papers have explored this issue in iran. this study aims to evaluate the visual fitness of public vehicle drivers in kerman province, southeast of iran. methods: a total of 4,003 public vehicle drivers were examined by one ophthalmologist for visual fitness in kerman province betw...

It has recently been noted that the relative prevalence of the various kinds of epistasis varies along an adaptive walk. This has been explained as a result of mean regression in NK model fitness landscapes. Here we show that this phenomenon occurs quite generally in fitness landscapes. We propose a simple and general explanation for this phenomenon, confirming the role of mean regression. We p...

We study the evolution of asexual microorganisms with small mutation rate in fluctuating environments, and develop techniques that allow us to expand the formal solution of the evolution equations to first order in the mutation rate. Our method can be applied to both discrete time and continuous time systems. While the behavior of continuous time systems is dominated by the average fitness land...

The only activity in which all the performance variables may be monitored simultaneously is the competition itself. The most valid single assessment of sporting fitness is sporting performance; but that performance may conceal a wide variety of both critical and non critical factors, and that assessment may provide inadequate information upon which to base alterations in the control system. Add...

The validity was investigated of 20-MST (20 Metre Endurance Shuttle Run Test) and PWC170 (Physical Working Capacity) field tests with laboratory-measured peak oxygen uptake (VO2peak) in a multiracial UK population of 12-year olds: 103 subjects completed the 20-MST and 96 of these completed the PWC170. To assess validity, a laboratory treadmill test was completed by ten boys and ten girls who ha...

Sutter, D. A. H., C. D. Suski, D. P. Philipp, T. Klefoth, D. H. Wahl, P. Kersten, S. J. Cooke, and R. Arlinghaus. 2012 Recreational Fishing Selectively Captures Individuals with the Highest Fitness Potential. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 51: 20960–20965. doi:10.1073/pnas.1212536109. Fisheries-induced evolution and its impact on the productivity of exploited fish stoc...

Evolution involves only a few simple processes, yet the resulting dynamics are surprisingly rich and complex. Sewall Wright developed the metaphor of fitness landscapes to provide deeper insight into the complex workings of evolution. Here we extend that metaphor by visualizing in real time the dynamic processes that drive evolution. We allow viewers to construct fitness landscapes interactivel...

Genetic Algorithms (GA's) are considered promising for music composition because they combine ‘creativity’ (ability to explore a large search space) with constraints (creative 'excess' is 'pruned' using a fitness function). A major difficulty with the use of GA's for this task is to define fitness functions which capture the aesthetic qualities of the wide range of successful melodies. In this ...

Researchers have argued that humans' attraction to average faces reflects an evolved psychological mechanism to identify high-quality mates. If this direct-selection account is correct, there is no reason to expect a similar averageness bias for stimuli that are irrelevant to reproductive fitness. The current study, however, found a strong relationship between averageness and attractiveness for...

3 Complex Tasks: problem and solutions 4 3.1 Hierarchial strategy . . . . . . . . . 4 3.1.1 Primitives Arbitrators . . . 4 3.1.2 GP and regulatory genes . . 5 3.2 Incremental strategy . . . . . . . . . 5 3.2.1 Training on a simplified task first . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.2.2 Training on a part of the task first . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.2.3 Dynamic fitness functions . . 6 3.2.4 Coev...