Most of the papers one sees about serious, potentially lucrative applications of biologically inspired optimization metaheuristics (algorithms like the one in the OP) are engineering-oriented.
For example, NASA used evolutionary computation to design a little antenna thing, and it went into space, and it was human-competitive (as good or better than anything a human could design in a reasonable amount of time). http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm
Most of the applications, in other words, have little to do with the kind of highly data-driven web applications with rapidly changing requirements that seems to occupy a lot of the time of the users on this site. :( Still, excellent candidate for spare-time/weekend hacking.
Finally, one basic thing to observe about most of these heuristics is that they are embarrassingly parallel, which means they really could make good use of a 16-core machine.
Comments
Most of the papers one sees about serious, potentially lucrative applications of biologically inspired optimization metaheuristics (algorithms like the one in the OP) are engineering-oriented.
For example, NASA used evolutionary computation to design a little antenna thing, and it went into space, and it was human-competitive (as good or better than anything a human could design in a reasonable amount of time). http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm
Most of the applications, in other words, have little to do with the kind of highly data-driven web applications with rapidly changing requirements that seems to occupy a lot of the time of the users on this site. :( Still, excellent candidate for spare-time/weekend hacking.
Finally, one basic thing to observe about most of these heuristics is that they are embarrassingly parallel, which means they really could make good use of a 16-core machine.
Koza's a pretty big name in that space:
http://www.genetic-programming.org/