Welcome to the web page of the ThRaSH'2012 workshop!
The 6th workshop on Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics is going to be held on May 2 and May 3, 2012. The conference venue of Polytech'Lille is located in Villeneuve d'Ascq in the north of France and which can be reached from downtown Lille by a 13 minutes long automated metro ride.
Randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, or simulated annealing are successfully used in various applications, both in combinatorial and numerical optimization. In contrast to problem-specific randomized algorithms, they are designed to be general black-box optimizers.
Given such a scenario, proving that such algorithms satisfy certain performance guarantees remains a hard and widely open problem. Gaining a theoretical understanding of randomized search heuristics is therefore an important task. Since these search heuristics are first and foremost optimization algorithms with stochastic elements, there is a clear potential in applying techniques developed in other research areas such as probability theory or "classical" optimization (such as problem-specific algorithms and numerical optimization) to analyze randomized search heuristics.
The aim of this workshop series is to stimulate interactions between people already working on these problems and those with a general background in natural computation or randomized algorithms or both. The primary focus lies on discussing recent ideas and detecting challenging topics for future work, rather than on the presention of final results.