Melanie Mitchell
Encyclopedia
Melanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University
Portland State University
Portland State University is a public state urban university located in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1946, it has the largest overall enrollment of any university in the state of Oregon, including undergraduate and graduate students. It is also the only public university in...

. She has worked at the Santa Fe Institute
Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems.The Institute houses a...

 and Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...

. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, Complex Systems
Complex systems
Complex systems present problems in mathematical modelling.The equations from which complex system models are developed generally derive from statistical physics, information theory and non-linear dynamics, and represent organized but unpredictable behaviors of systems of nature that are considered...

, 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
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...

 and John Holland
John Henry Holland
John Henry Holland is an American scientist and Professor of Psychology and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a pioneer in complex systems and nonlinear science. He is known as the father of genetic algorithms. He was awarded...

, for which she developed the Copycat
Copycat (software)
Copycat is a model of analogy making and human cognition based on the concept of the parallel terraced scan, developed in 1988 by Douglas Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell, and others at the at , Indiana University Bloomington...

 cognitive architecture. She is the author of "Analogy-Making as Perception", essentially a book about Copycat
Copycat (software)
Copycat is a model of analogy making and human cognition based on the concept of the parallel terraced scan, developed in 1988 by Douglas Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell, and others at the at , Indiana University Bloomington...

. She has also critiqued Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.- Biography :...

's A New Kind of Science
A New Kind of Science
A New Kind of Science is a book by Stephen Wolfram, published in 2002. It contains an empirical and systematic study of computational systems such as cellular automata...

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/new-kind-of-science-review.pdf and also showed that genetic algorithms could find better solutions to the majority problem in cellular automata
Majority problem (cellular automaton)
The majority problem, or density classification task is the problem of finding one-dimensional cellular automaton rules that accurately perform majority voting.Using local transition rules, cells cannot know the total count of all the ones in system...

. 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.

Selected publications


External links

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