Former Army MP Mercy Carr and her retired bomb-sniffing dog Elvis are back in Blind Search, the sequel to the page-turning, critically acclaimed A Borrowing of Bones It’s October, hunting season in the Green Mountains—and the Vermont wilderness has never been more beautiful or more dangerous. Especially for nine-year-old Henry, who’s lost in the woods. Again. Only this time he sees something terrible. When a young woman is found shot through the heart with a fatal arrow, Mercy thinks that something is murder. But Henry, a math genius whose autism often silences him when he should speak up most, is not talking. Now there’s a murderer hiding among the hunters in the forest—and Mercy and Elvis must team up with their crime-solving friends, game warden Troy Warner and search-and-rescue dog Susie Bear, to find the killer—before the killer finds Henry. When an early season blizzard hits the mountains, cutting them off from the rest of the world, the race is on to solve the crime, apprehend the murderer, and keep the boy safe until the snowplows get through. Inspired by the true search-and-rescue case of an autistic boy who got lost in the Vermont wilderness, Paula Munier's mystery is a compelling roller coaster ride through the worst of winter—and human nature.

The goal of this book is to gather in a single work the most relevant concepts related in optimization methods, showing how such theories and methods can be addressed using the open source, multi-platform R tool. Modern optimization methods, also known as metaheuristics, are particularly useful for solving complex problems for which no specialized optimization algorithm has been developed. These methods often yield high quality solutions with a more reasonable use of computational resources (e.g. memory and processing effort). Examples of popular modern methods discussed in this book are: simulated annealing; tabu search; genetic algorithms; differential evolution; and particle swarm optimization. This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, information technology, and related areas, as well as data analysts interested in exploring modern optimization methods using R. This new edition integrates the latest R packages through text and code examples. It also discusses new topics, such as: the impact of artificial intelligence and business analytics in modern optimization tasks; the creation of interactive Web applications; usage of parallel computing; and more modern optimization algorithms (e.g., iterated racing, ant colony optimization, grammatical evolution).

This text presents a theory of genius and creativity, based on the personality characteristics of creative persons and geniuses. It uses modern research into the causes of cognitive over-inclusiveness to suggest possible applications of these theories to c

Decades of innovations in combinatorial problem solving have produced better and more complex algorithms. These new methods are better since they can solve larger problems and address new application domains. They are also more complex which means that they are hard to reproduce and often harder to fine-tune to the peculiarities of a given problem. This last point has created a paradox where efficient tools are out of reach of practitioners. Autonomous search (AS) represents a new research field defined to precisely address the above challenge. Its major strength and originality consist in the fact that problem solvers can now perform self-improvement operations based on analysis of the performances of the solving process -- including short-term reactive reconfiguration and long-term improvement through self-analysis of the performance, offline tuning and online control, and adaptive control and supervised control. Autonomous search "crosses the chasm" and provides engineers and practitioners with systems that are able to autonomously self-tune their performance while effectively solving problems. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and it can be used as a reference for researchers, engineers, and postgraduates in the areas of constraint programming, machine learning, evolutionary computing, and feedback control theory. After the editors' introduction to autonomous search, the chapters are focused on tuning algorithm parameters, autonomous complete (tree-based) constraint solvers, autonomous control in metaheuristics and heuristics, and future autonomous solving paradigms. Autonomous search (AS) represents a new research field defined to precisely address the above challenge. Its major strength and originality consist in the fact that problem solvers can now perform self-improvement operations based on analysis of the performances of the solving process -- including short-term reactive reconfiguration and long-term improvement through self-analysis of the performance, offline tuning and online control, and adaptive control and supervised control. Autonomous search "crosses the chasm" and provides engineers and practitioners with systems that are able to autonomously self-tune their performance while effectively solving problems. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and it can be used as a reference for researchers, engineers, and postgraduates in the areas of constraint programming, machine learning, evolutionary computing, and feedback control theory. After the editors' introduction to autonomous search, the chapters are focused on tuning algorithm parameters, autonomous complete (tree-based) constraint solvers, autonomous control in metaheuristics and heuristics, and future autonomous solving paradigms. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and it can be used as a reference for researchers, engineers, and postgraduates in the areas of constraint programming, machine learning, evolutionary computing, and feedback control theory. After the editors' introduction to autonomous search, the chapters are focused on tuning algorithm parameters, autonomous complete (tree-based) constraint solvers, autonomous control in metaheuristics and heuristics, and future autonomous solving paradigms. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and it can be used as a reference for researchers, engineers, and postgraduates in the areas of constraint programming, machine learning, evolutionary computing, and feedback control theory. After the editors' introduction to autonomous search, the chapters are focused on tuning algorithm parameters, autonomous complete (tree-based) constraint solvers, autonomous control in metaheuristics and heuristics, and future autonomous solving paradigms.

Introducton; Methology of knowledge representation; General inference principles; Hierarchical control systems; Expert control systems; Fuzzy control systems; Neurocontrol systems; Learning control systems; Intelligente control systems in application; Prospectives of intelligente control; References; Bibliography; Subject index.

This book offers students and AI programmers a new perspective on the study of artificial intelligence concepts. The essential topics and theory of AI are presented, but it also includes practical information on data input & reduction as well as data output (i.e., algorithm usage). Because traditional AI concepts such as pattern recognition, numerical optimization and data mining are now simply types of algorithms, a different approach is needed. This “sensor / algorithm / effecter” approach grounds the algorithms with an environment, helps students and AI practitioners to better understand them, and subsequently, how to apply them. The book has numerous up to date applications in game programming, intelligent agents, neural networks, artificial immune systems, and more. A CD-ROM with simulations, code, and figures accompanies the book.

Dr. S. Murugan, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Alagappa Government Arts College, Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu, India