Rather than bog things down with more administrivia:
Just wondering if anyone else noted the following
paper on the applications of evolving genetic/Darwinian
algorithms applied for solving crystal structures
from Powder X-ray diffraction data. One of the
A-lifers here at DL brought this to my attention.
Chemical Physics Letters, 280 (1997) 189-195
"The application of a genetic algorithm for
solving crystal structures from powder
diffraction data", B. M. Kariuki,
H. Serrano-Gonazlez, R. L. Johnson, K. D. M.
Harris. School of Chemistry, University of Birmingham.
In this paper, to solve the structure of
ortho-thymotic acid, they used ITO for indexing, then
genetic algorithms in a program called GAPSS to
solve the structure by adopting "the "direct-space"
philosophy for structure solution," that "implicitly
avoids the problematic step of extracting the
intensities of individual reflections from the
powder data". The resulting structure solution
was then refined using GSAS. They cite a paper
that makes the claim that genetic algorithms
are often found superior to approaches based
on molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo techniques.
----
If into the applications of Artificial Life
style algorithms - this could be a good
paper to catch. Though I would also be
interested in references related to genetic
programming and genetic algorithms to
Powder Diffraction and Crystallography.
There was a recent paper in Acta Cryst(?) of
the applications of Genetic Algorithms for
direct methods - as being superior over
random searching methods.
Lachlan.
PS: A good general introduction into the
Artifical Life Sciences, its history
and applications is:
Steven Levy, Artificial Life - The quest for a
New Creation. 1992.
-- Lachlan M. D. CranswickCCP14 for Single Crystal and Powder DiffractionDaresbury Laboratory, Warrington, WA4 4AD U.KTel: +44-1925-603703 Fax: +44-1925-603173 Room C14E-mail: l.cranswick@dl.ac.uk
Personal Crystallographic WWW: http://www.unige.ch/crystal/stxnews/stx/volnteer.htmCommission on Powder Diffraction, Quantitative Phase Analysis Round Robin: http://www.dl.ac.uk/SRS/XRD/IUCR/QARR/Society of Crystallogaphers in Australia (SCA): http://www.sca.asn.au/Australasian Web Publishers Association: (AWPA): http://www.awpa.asn.au/Australian X-ray Analytical Association (AXAA): http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/axaa/