An interactive distributed evolutionary algorithm (IDEA) for design

Evolutionary computation (EC) has been successfully applied to a wide range of design problems. There has also been an abundant amount of work in applying interactive ECs in the design of displays, robot behavior, bitmaps, etc. In the EC literature, one can also see a number of successful design applications of distributed ECs. However, to date, there has been no research in the area of interactive distributed ECs. In this paper, we present an interactive distributed evolutionary algorithm (IDEA) for the design of simple emoticons. We will discuss two ways that our IDEA is currently being used including the areas of EC education and Human Factors.