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Evolutionary Multitasking: A Computer Science View of Cognitive Multitasking

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Abstract

The human mind possesses the most remarkable ability to perform multiple tasks with apparent simultaneity. In fact, with the present-day explosion in the variety and volume of incoming information streams that must be absorbed and appropriately processed, the opportunity, tendency, and (even) the need to multitask are unprecedented. Thus, it comes as little surprise that the pursuit of intelligent systems and algorithms that are capable of efficient multitasking is rapidly gaining importance among contemporary scientists who are faced with the increasing complexity of real-world problems. To this end, the present paper is dedicated to a detailed exposition on a so-far underexplored characteristic of population-based search algorithms, i.e., their inherent ability (much like the human mind) to handle multiple optimization tasks at once. We present a simple evolutionary methodology capable of cross-domain multitask optimization in a unified genotype space and show that there exist many potential benefits of its application in practical domains. Most notably, it is revealed that multitasking enables one to automatically leverage upon the underlying commonalities between distinct optimization tasks, thereby providing the scope for considerably improved performance in real-world problem solving.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Yuan Yuan, Research Fellow in the School of Computer Engineering, NTU, Singapore, for his assistance in producing some of the figures presented in the paper.

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  1. School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Yew-Soon Ong & Abhishek Gupta

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  1. Yew-Soon Ong
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  2. Abhishek Gupta
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Correspondence to Yew-Soon Ong.

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Yew-Soon Ong, Abhishek Gupta declare that they have no conflict of interest

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Declaration of Helsinki 1975, as revised in 2008 (5). Additional informed consent was obtained from all patients for which identifying information is included in this article.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Ong, YS., Gupta, A. Evolutionary Multitasking: A Computer Science View of Cognitive Multitasking. Cogn Comput 8, 125–142 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-016-9395-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-016-9395-7

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