Trace Selection for Interactive Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper presents a selection method for use with interactive evolutionary algorithms and sensitivity analysis in spatiotemporal domains. Recent work in the field has made it possible to give feedback to an interactive evolutionary system with a finer granularity than the typical wholesale selection method. This recent development allows the user to drive the evolutionary search in a more precise way by allowing him to select a part of a phenotype to indicate fitness. The method has potential to alleviate the human fatigue bottleneck, so it seems ideally suited for use in domains that vary in both space and time, such as character motion or cloth simulation where evaluation times are long. However no evolutionary interface has been developed yet which will allow for selecting parts of time-varying phenotypes. We present a selection interface that should be fast and intuitive enough to minimize the interaction bottleneck in evolutionary algorithms that receive feedback at the phenotype part level.