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12.3 Human Competitive Results – the Humies 119

• Creation of a sorting network for seven items using only 16 steps (Koza
et al., 1999, Sections 21.4.4, 23.6, and 57.8.1).

• Synthesis of analogue circuits (with placement and routing, in some
cases), including: 60- and 96-decibel amplifiers (Koza et al., 1999,
Section 45.3); circuits for squaring, cubing, square root, cube root,
logarithm, and Gaussian functions (Koza et al., 1999, Section 47.5.3);
a circuit for time-optimal control of a robot (Koza et al., 1999, Section
48.3); an electronic thermometer (Koza et al., 1999, Section 49.3); a
voltage-current conversion circuit (Koza, Keane, Streeter, Mydlowec,
Yu, and Lanza, 2003, Section 15.4.4).

• Creation of a cellular automaton rule for the majority classification
problem that is better than all known rules written by humans (Andre
et al., 1996).
• Synthesis of topology for controllers, including: a PID (proportional,
integrative, and derivative) controller (Koza et al., 2003, Section 9.2)
and a PID-D2 (proportional, integrative, derivative, and second deriva-
tive) controller (Koza et al., 2003, Section 3.7); PID tuning rules that
outperform the Ziegler-Nichols and Astrom-Hagglund tuning rules
(Koza et al., 2003, Chapter 12); three non-PID controllers that out-
perform a PID controller that uses the Ziegler-Nichols or Astrom-
Hagglund tuning rules (Koza et al., 2003, Chapter 13).
In total (Koza and Poli, 2005) lists 36 human-competitive results. These
include 23 cases where GP has duplicated the functionality of a previously
patented invention, infringed a previously patented invention, or created a
patentable new invention. Specifically, there are fifteen examples where GP
has created an entity that either infringes or duplicates the functionality of
th
a previously patented 20 -century invention, six instances where GP has
done the same with respect to an invention patented after 1 January 2000,
and two cases where GP has created a patentable new invention. The two
new inventions are general-purpose controllers that outperform controllers
employing tuning rules that have been in widespread use in industry for
most of the 20 th century.
Many of the pre-2004 results were obtained by Koza. However, since
2004, a competition has been held annually at ACM’s Genetic and Evolu-
tionary Computation Conference (termed the Human-Competitive awards
– the Humies). The $10,000 prize is awarded to projects that have pro-
duced automatically-created results which equal or better those produced
by humans.
The Humies Prizes have typically been awarded to applications of evo-
lutionary computation to high-tech fields. Many used GP. For example,
the 2004 gold medals were given for the design, via GP, of an antenna for