Aging is a general mechanism that some randomized search heuristics employ to increase the diversity of their collection of search points. A more diverse collection of search points is believed to improve the search heuristic’s performance for difficult problems. The most prominent randomized search heuristics with aging are evolutionary algorithms and artificial immune systems. While it is kno...

The distinction between the effects of aging as a chronological process and diseases whose prevalence increase with advancing age remains blurred. Conditions once thought to be inevitable companions of old age are now known to in fact be pathological in origin and thus possibly treatable and preventable. One example is senile dementia, no longer the mysterious fate of the very old, but often a ...