This page is not only under construction and will be for an indefinite period of time, it is probably also outdated, incomplete and may even be incorrect. I will try to counter any of the above attributes, I hope that the page is still helpful and you find what you are looking for.

Contact

drs. ing. Ron Breukelaar

Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS)
Leiden University
P.O. Box 9512
2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
phone: +31 71 527 7041 (work) +31 627 451646 (mobile)
email: rbreukel@liacs.nl

Publications

Tetris

In 2002 (when I was still a student) I was intrigued by an article on the NP-completeness of the computer game Tetris by Demaine, Hohenberger and Liben-Nowell. After carefully reading the proof I discovered a small simplification that shortened the proof a lot. This I wrote up in a technical report:

Ron Breukelaar, Hendrik Jan Hoogeboom and Walter Kosters, Tetris is Hard, Made Easy, Internal Technical Report, Universiteit Leiden (2003). [pdf]

which was sent to MIT and had a joint publication as a result:

Ron Breukelaar, Erik D. Demaine, Susan Hohenberger, Hedrik Jan Hoogeboom, Walter A. Kosters and David Liben-Nowell, Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate, International Journal of Computational Geometry & Applications, Vol. 14, Nr. 1-2, World Scientific Publishing Company, pg. 41--68 (2004). [pdf]

In 2004 this research was nominated for the "Ontdekker van het Jaar" (discoverer of the year) [link (dutch)] award at the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (University Leiden).

Cellular Automata

Under guidance of prof. dr. Thomas Bäck I did my master thesis on the inverse design of multi dimensional cellular automata.

Ron Breukelaar, Evolving Transition Rules for Cellular Automata with Multiple Dimensions, Master Thesis, Internal Report 04-15, Universiteit Leiden, Opleiding Informatica (2004). [pdf]

I completed the master thesis in 2004 and was offered a PhD position in the Natural Computing group at the university of Leiden under the supervision of prof. dr. Thomas Bäck. There I continued my research on the cellular automata which resulted in publications on a number of conferences and journals:

Ron Breukelaar and Thomas Bäck, Evolving Transition Rules for Multi Dimensional Cellular Automata, proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2004, Peter M.A. Sloot, Bastien Chopard and Alfons G. Hoekstra (editors), Springer-Verlag GmbH LNCS 3305, pg. 182--190 (2004). [pdf]


Thomas Bäck, Ron Breukelaar and Lars Willmes, Problem Solving by Evolution: One of Nature's Unconventional Programming Paradigms, pre-proceedings of Unconventional Programming Paradigms workshop, UPP 2004, Jean-Pierre Banâtre, Pascal Fradet, Jean-Louis Giavitto and Olivier Michel (Editors), Springer-Verlag GmbH, pg. 8--13 (2005). [pdf]


Ron Breukelaar and Thomas Bäck, Using a Genetic Algorithm to Evolve Behavior in Multi Dimensional Cellular Automata, proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2005, Hans-Georg Beyer et al. (editors), ACM 1-59593-010-8/05/0006, pg. 107--114 (2005). [pdf]


Thomas Bäck, Ron Breukelaar and Lars Willmes, Inverse Design of Cellular Automata by Genetic Algorithms: an Unconventional Programming Paradigm, Unconventional Programming Paradigms: International Workshop UPP 2004, Revised Selected and Invited Papers, Jean-Pierre Banâtre et al. (editors), Springer-Verlag GmbH LNCS 3566, pg. 161--172 (2005). [pdf]


Ron Breukelaar and Thomas Bäck, Using a Genetic Algorithm to Evolve Behavior in Cellular Automata, proceedings of Computation: 4th International Conference, UC 2005, Sevilla, Spain, October 3 - 7, 2005., Cristian S. Calude, Michael J. Dinneen, Gheorghe Paun, Mario J. Péréz-Jiménez and Grzegorz Rozenberg (editors), Springer-Verlag GmbH LNCS Volume 3699, pg. 1--10 (2005). [pdf]

Interactive Evolutionary Algorithms

Ron Breukelaar, Michael Emmerich and Thomas Bäck, On Interactive Evolution Strategies, proceeding of Applications of Evolutionary Computing, EvoWorkshop2006: EvoINTERACT, Franz Rothlauf et al. (editors), Springer-Verlag GmbH LNCS Volume 3907, pg. 530--541 (2006). [pdf]

Future Work