The Responsibility of Law Schools: Educating Lawyers as Counselors and Problem Solvers

American legal education is as strong as ever in doctrine and legal analysis; however, it is strikingly weak in teaching other foundational skills and knowledge that lawyers need as counselors, problem solvers and negotiators. Brest proposes a series of advanced courses that integrate the fundamental lawyering skills of counseling, problem solving and negotiation with insights from other disciplines

Using Differential Evolution for the Graph Coloring

Differential evolution was developed for reliable and versatile function optimization. It has also become interesting for other domains because of its ease to use. In this paper, we posed the question of whether differential evolution can also be used by solving of the combinatorial optimization problems, and in particular, for the graph coloring problem. Therefore, a hybrid self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm for graph coloring was proposed that is comparable with the best heuristics for graph coloring today, i.e. Tabucol of Hertz and de Werra and the hybrid evolutionary algorithm of Galinier and Hao. We have focused on the graph 3-coloring. Therefore, the evolutionary algorithm with method SAW of Eiben et al., which achieved excellent results for this kind of graphs, was also incorporated into this study. The extensive experiments show that the differential evolution could become a competitive tool for the solving of graph coloring problem in the future

The Responsibility of Law Schools: Educating Lawyers as Counselors and Problem Solvers

American legal education is as strong as ever in doctrine and legal analysis; however, it is strikingly weak in teaching other foundational skills and knowledge that lawyers need as counselors, problem solvers and negotiators. Brest proposes a series of advanced courses that integrate the fundamental lawyering skills of counseling, problem solving and negotiation with insights from other disciplines

Low-Autocorrelation Binary Sequences: On Improved Merit Factors and Runtime Predictions to Achieve Them

The search for binary sequences with a high figure of merit, known as the low autocorrelation binary sequence ($labs$}) problem, represents a formidable computational challenge. To mitigate the computational constraints of the problem, we consider solvers that accept odd values of sequence length $L$ and return solutions for skew-symmetric binary sequences only -- with the consequence that not all best solutions under this constraint will be optimal for each $L$. In order to improve both, the search for best merit factor $and$ the asymptotic runtime performance, we instrumented three stochastic solvers, the first two are state-of-the-art solvers that rely on variants of memetic and tabu search ($lssMAts$ and $lssRRts$), the third solver ($lssOrel$) organizes the search as a sequence of independent contiguous self-avoiding walk segments. By adapting a rigorous statistical methodology to performance testing of all three combinatorial solvers, experiments show that the solver with the best asymptotic average-case performance, $lssOrel\_8 = 0.000032*1.1504^L$, has the best chance of finding solutions that improve, as $L$ increases, figures of merit reported to date. The same methodology can be applied to engineering new $labs$ solvers that may return merit factors even closer to the conjectured asymptotic value of 12.3248

Protein Folding Optimization using Differential Evolution Extended with Local Search and Component Reinitialization

This paper presents a novel Differential Evolution algorithm for protein folding optimization that is applied to a three-dimensional AB off-lattice model. The proposed algorithm includes two new mechanisms. A local search is used to improve convergence speed and to reduce the runtime complexity of the energy calculation. For this purpose, a local movement is introduced within the local search. The designed evolutionary algorithm has fast convergence speed and, therefore, when it is trapped into the local optimum or a relatively good solution is located, it is hard to locate a better similar solution. The similar solution is different from the good solution in only a few components. A component reinitialization method is designed to mitigate this problem. Both the new mechanisms and the proposed algorithm were analyzed on well-known amino acid sequences that are used frequently in the literature. Experimental results show that the employed new mechanisms improve the efficiency of our algorithm and that the proposed algorithm is superior to other state-of-the-art algorithms. It obtained a hit ratio of 100% for sequences up to 18 monomers, within a budget of $10^{11}$ solution evaluations. New best-known solutions were obtained for most of the sequences. The existence of the symmetric best-known solutions is also demonstrated in the paper.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, 10 tables, journa

Memetic Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Large-Scale Global Optimization

Memetic computation (MC) has emerged recently as a new paradigm of efficient algorithms for solving the hardest optimization problems. On the other hand, artificial bees colony (ABC) algorithms demonstrate good performances when solving continuous and combinatorial optimization problems. This study tries to use these technologies under the same roof. As a result, a memetic ABC (MABC) algorithm has been developed that is hybridized with two local search heuristics: the Nelder-Mead algorithm (NMA) and the random walk with direction exploitation (RWDE). The former is attended more towards exploration, while the latter more towards exploitation of the search space. The stochastic adaptation rule was employed in order to control the balancing between exploration and exploitation. This MABC algorithm was applied to a Special suite on Large Scale Continuous Global Optimization at the 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. The obtained results the MABC are comparable with the results of DECC-G, DECC-G*, and MLCC.Comment: CONFERENCE: IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Brisbane, Australia, 201