Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University. She has worked at the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, Complex Systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.

She received her PhD in 1990 from the University of Michigan under Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland, for which she developed the Copycat cognitive architecture. She is the author of "Analogy-Making as Perception", essentially a book about Copycat. She has also critiqued Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science[1] and also showed that genetic algorithms could find better solutions to the majority problem in cellular automata. She is the author of "An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms" (ISBN 0-262-63185-7), a widely known introductory book published by MIT Press in 1996.

Books

• Mitchell, Melanie. Analogy-Making as Perception. ISBN 0-262-13289-3 (hardback).  (1993)
• Mitchell, Melanie (1998). An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0262631857.  (1998)
• Mitchell, Melanie (2009). Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195124413.  (2009)

Selected publications

• Mitchell, M., Holland, J. H., and Forrest, S. (1994). "When will a genetic algorithm outperform hill climbing?". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 6: 51–58. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mitchell93when.html. 
• Melanie Mitchell, Peter T. Hraber, and James P. Crutchfield (1993). "Revisiting the edge of chaos: Evolving cellular automata to perform computations". Complex Systems 7: 89–130. http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/rev-edge.pdf. 
• Melanie Mitchell, James P. Crutchfield and Peter T. Hraber. Dynamics, Computation, and the "Edge of Chaos": A Re-Examination

External links

• Mitchell's professional homepage