Within the framework of system categories and principles St. Petersburg scientific school social synergetics, problems relationship between managing course history determining its main vector, as well freedom responsibility, “correctness” “success” a subject choosing options for evolution, are involved in research. People through whom “evolutionary mechanisms” realized carriers evolutionary cha...

The work presented in this thesis concerns schema and object evolution in knowledge based systems. It is realized in the framework of the knowledge representation system Shood. We try to solve extensibility and reuse problems for evolution mechanisms. We propose an evolution system which allows the definition and the management of the dynamics. This management is realized by a set of mechanisms...

The increasing importance of better customisation of industrial products has led to development of configurable products. They allow companies to provide product families with a large number, typically millions of variants. Description and management of a large product variety within a single data model is challenging and requires a solid conceptual basis. This management differs from the schem...

On the car market, competition has increased significantly during the last decades (see e.g. Scherer, 1996). Many big car markets in e.g. Western Europe and America have stagnated, thus causing overproduction (Affärsvärlden, 1997). As markets mature and competition intensifies, the focus of marketing strategy shifts progressively from acquiring new customers to retaining current ones (Reicheld ...

Human language is still an embarrassment for evolutionary theory, as the speaker’s benefit remains unclear. The willingness to communicate information is shown here to be an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), even if acquiring original information from the environment involves significant cost and communicating it provides no material benefit to addressees. In this study, communication is used...

Wildlife management has evolved through a series of stages, with early efforts directed toward individual species. Since the late 1800s, however, more wildlife applications have incorporated a systems approach, where communities are managed to promote the quality, quantity, and fitness of most associated species. Vertebrate pest management has followed a similar course of development, although ...

One of the main problems in applying evolutionary optimisation methods is the choice of operators and parameter values. This paper propose a competitive evolution method, in which several subpopulations are allowed to compete for computer time. The population with the fittest members, and that with the highest improvement rate in the recent past, are rewarded. When using identical strategies in...

The Internet Chess Club, or ICC, is a highly successful virtual gaming community. This paper examines the evolution from its 1995 inception as a pure gaming community to the present day as a successful business with over 26,000 paid members. We give a particular focus on the underlying qualities the ICC possesses in order to succeed and grow such as utilization of real-world credibility indicat...