I wanted to share a feature that we have included into our trunk yesterday and which will be part of the next release. It was our intention to aid people in benchmarking their algorithms. Usually in the literature a number of benchmark problem instances are known and shared. These instances allow to directly compare the performance of two algorithms. We have now included some of these benchmark libraries as plugins and make them directly available with HeuristicLab. Currently we have included TSPLIB, QAPLIB, and several others. Each library is a separate plugin that stores the files inside the assembly. It is very easy to add new benchmark libraries, as well as to adapt the problems to use them. A problem can make use of multiple, even different libraries.

We plan to expand this to include even more libraries so that you don't have to search the web for the files, but just load them in HeuristicLab. You can try the feature for yourself if you grab the latest daily build.

Happy new year! The HeuristicLab development team kicked off 2012 with the brand new HeuristicLab 3.3.6 release.

One of the most exciting new features of HeuristicLab 3.3.6 is HeuristicLab Hive which provides an infrastructure for parallel and distributed computing. Hive consists of a server and computation slaves. Users can upload jobs to the Hive server which distributes the jobs among the available slaves. The slaves execute the jobs and send the result back to the server after they are finished. More information about how to install a Hive server and Hive slaves and how to use Hive in general can be found in the Howtos.

Additional new features in HeuristicLab 3.3.6 include:

• Robust Taboo Search for the Quadratic Assignment Problem
• New Standard Algorithms for Regression and Classification (kNN, Neural Networks, Multi-Nominal Logit Regression)
• Genetic Programming Grammar Editor
• New Standard Tree-Creation Operators for Genetic Programming (Grow, Full, Ramped Half-Half)
• RunCollectionModifiers to Combine and Transform Algorithm Results
• Improved Customization and Export of Charts
• Performance Benchmarks

For a full list of all changes in HeuristicLab 3.3.6 have a look at the ChangeLog.

Go to the Download page or click on the image below to get HeuristicLab 3.3.6 now!