Research
Peer-reviewed work spanning evolutionary algorithms, optimisation, machine learning, bioinformatics and artificial life.
Portland, Oregon · June 2004
Evolutionary computation, then and now.
A modern historical resource exploring the people, research and ideas of the 2004 Congress on Evolutionary Computation — and why they still matter to artificial intelligence today.
19–23 JuneTutorials and conference, 2004
PortlandMarriott Downtown, Oregon
IEEE CECInternational research congress
2 volumesPublished conference proceedings
The original event
A meeting place for evolving ideas.
CEC2004 brought researchers, practitioners and students from around the world to Portland to discuss advances in evolutionary computation: systems that search, adapt and improve through mechanisms inspired by evolution and collective behaviour.
Exchange
Plenary lectures, tutorials, special sessions, competitions and conversations across a global technical community.
Legacy
Ideas that continue to influence optimisation, adaptive systems, robotics and modern approaches to AI.
Fields represented
Intelligence inspired by adaptation.
CEC2004 treated evolutionary computation broadly. Its themes now read like a map of several enduring areas in computational intelligence.
Explore the conceptsEvolutionary algorithms
Populations of candidate solutions improve through variation, evaluation and selection.
Swarm intelligence
Simple agents interact locally, producing useful global behaviour without central control.
Multiobjective optimisation
Methods explore not one perfect answer, but families of solutions balancing competing goals.
Artificial life
Computational models investigate emergence, adaptation and life-like behaviour in complex systems.
A notable moment
Cooperation as an evolutionary question.
CEC2004 marked the twentieth anniversary of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma work with a special plenary lecture by political scientist Robert Axelrod. Documented in the original programme and proceedings
The lecture, recorded as The Future of Cooperation, connected game theory, adaptation and social behaviour — a reminder that evolutionary computation has always reached beyond optimisation alone.
Meet the speakersFrom 2004 to today
Not a time capsule. A line of continuity.
CEC meets in Portland
The congress gathers a broad international community around evolutionary algorithms, swarm methods, games, bioinformatics and adaptive systems.
Evolutionary methods scale
Improved computing and parallel hardware expand experiments in robotics, automated design, optimisation and neuroevolution.
Evolution meets modern AI
Evolutionary search complements gradient-based learning in architecture search, agent behaviour, quality-diversity and difficult black-box problems.
Follow the record
Built from sources, not nostalgia.
This restoration is grounded in the original conference pages, IEEE material, bibliographic records and surviving university pages. Where evidence is incomplete, the archive says so.