Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, or PPSN, is a research conference focusing on the topic of natural computing.
Other conferences in the area include the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) and EvoStar (Evo*).
In 2020 PPSN got a CORE rank of A, corresponding to an "excellent conference, and highly respected in a discipline area".
History
The idea behind PPSN emerged around 1989-1990 when Bernard Manderick, Reinhard Männer, Heinz Mühlenbein, and Hans-Paul Schwefel, realised they shared a common field of study that was not covered by the conferences on Operations Research, Physics, or Computer Science they attended regularly.
The field of Genetic Algorithms had already been established in the form of the ICGA conference in 1985, but the "fathers" of PPSN wanted a wider focus, with algorithms that included problem solving, parallel computing and the use of natural metaphors (such as Darwinian evolution or Boltzmann dynamics).
The success of the first PPSN event at Dortmund encouraged its organisers to start a biennial conference series, as a European counterpart to the American-based ICGA (which in 1999 merged with the Genetic Programming conference to give rise to GECCO).
Analogies to natural processes included the thermodynamic process of annealing, immune systems and neural networks, as well as other paradigms, with Darwinian evolution being by far the most frequently used metaphor.
In this way, evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary computation became the common denominator for the PPSN approach to problem solving by mimicking evolutionary principles like population, birth and death, mutation, recombination, and natural selection.
Editions
So far, seventeen PPSN conferences have been held: Dortmund (October 1–3, 1990), Brussels (September 28–30, 1992), Jerusalem (October 9–14, 1994), Berlin (September 22–26, 1996), Amsterdam (September 27–30, 1998), Paris (September 16–20, 2000), Granada (September 7–11, 2002), Birmingham (September 18–22, 2004), Reykjavik (September 9–13, 2006), Dortmund (September 13–17, 2008), Krakow (September 11–15, 2010), Taormina (Sicily) (September 1–5, 2012), Ljubljana (September 13–17, 2014), Edinburgh (September 17–21, 2016), Coimbra (September 8–12, 2018) Leiden (September 5–9, 2020), and Dortmund (September 10-14, 2022).
The last-but-one edition, held in Leiden, counted on Thomas Bäck and Mike Preuss as General Chairs and Carola Doerr, Michael Emmerich and Heike Trautmann as Programme Committee Chairs. André Deutz and Hao Wang were Proceedings Chairs and Anna Esparcia-Alcázar, Ofer Shir and Vanessa Volz were Workshops, Tutorials and Competitions Chairs, respectively; Anna Kononova was Local Chair.
Proceedings
Proceedings of PPSN have been historically published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series (except in the second edition in 1992).