evolutionary algorithms are some of the most crucial random approaches tosolve the problems, but sometimes generate low quality solutions. on the otherhand, learning automata are adaptive decision-making devices, operating onunknown random environments, so it seems that if evolutionary and learningautomaton based algorithms are operated simultaneously, the quality of results willincrease sharpl...

For a set of n points in the plane, we consider the axis–aligned (p, k)-Box Covering problem: Find p axis-aligned, pairwise-disjoint boxes that together contain at least n − k points. In this paper, we consider the boxes to be either squares or rectangles, and we want to minimize the area of the largest box. For general p we show that the problem is NP-hard for both squares and rectangles. For ...