Hill of Doon

Occurrence of a Snail Borne Disease, Cercarial Dermatitis (Swimmer Itch) in Doon Valley (Uttarakhand), India

BACKGROUND 'Cercarial dermatitis' also known as swimmers itch (Skin allergies) is caused by a trematode parasite, Schistosoma which has two hosts - an invertebrate (snail) and a vertebrate (livestock, human being). Although the availability of both vector snails and pathogens at the selected site the Doon Valley in northern India has already been confirmed but there was a hazy picture of the di...

A Society of Hill-climbers

|This paper is concerned with function optimization in binary search spaces. It focuses on how hill-climbers can work together and/or use their past trials in order to speed up the search. A hill-climber is viewed as a set of mutations. The challenge is twofold: one must determine how many bits should be mutated, and which bits should preferably be mutated, or in other words, which climbing dir...

Hill - Climbing Theories of Learning

Much human learning appears to be gradual and unconscious, suggesting a very limited form of search through the space of hypotheses. We propose hill climbing as a framework for such learning and consider a number of systems that learn in this manner. We focus on CLASSIT, a model of concept formation that incrementally acquires a conceptual hierarchy, and MAGGIE, a model of skill improvement tha...

The Treatment of Hill Diarrhœa

Probabilistic Hill-climbing

Many learning tasks involve searching through a discrete space of performance elements, seeking an element whose future utility is expected to be high. As the task of nding the global optimum is often intractable, many practical learning systems use simple forms of hill-climbing to nd a locally optimal element. However, hill-climbing can be complicated by the fact that the utility value of a pe...