Evolution strategies are a powerful variant of the evolutionary algorithms, which themselves are probabilistic optimization methods. Many sophisticated methods have been developed to increase the convergence of evolution strategies. Self-adaptation is one of these methods and allows an evolution strategy to adapt to the goal function. Nevertheless most real world applications of evolution strategies do not make use of the self-adaptation. The authors analyze the reasons for this and introduce a new type of self-adaptation that overcomes the disadvantages of the known types. Experimental results based on the sphere model are presented, which show an significant increase of performance.

Fuzzy logic in the field of image processing is becoming more and more important. Image quality is improving, but data contains different kinds of uncertainty which have to be handled using computerized analysis. These uncertainties can be found particularly in medical image data. In this paper, the handling of such uncertainties using methods such as the natural language of medical experts and iconic fuzzy sets for the description and recognition of anatomical structures in magnetic resonance tomograms (MRT) of human heads are presented.

A new method for computing the prime implicants of a Boolean function from an arbitrary sum-of-products form is given. It depends on the observation that the prime implicants of a Boolean function can be obtained from the prime implicants of its subfunctions with respect to a fixed but arbitrary variable. The problem of obtaining all irredundant sums from the list of all prime implicants and an arbitrary list of implicants representing the function is solved. The irredundant sums are in one-to-one relation to the prime implicants of a positive Boolean function associated with these lists. The known formulas of Petrick, Ghazala, Tison, Mott, and Chang are obtained as special cases and incompletely specified functions can also be handled. We give a complete and simple method for finding the positive Boolean function mentioned above. The paper is self-contained and examples are included.

A new proof is given for the following fact: All minimal congruences on a transition graph are of one of four types and can easily be obtained by inspecting the graph.