Textbook of AI

1929–2015, Computer scientist, complex systems theorist

John Henry Holland was an American computer scientist and pioneer of evolutionary computation. An attendee of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, he received the first computer science PhD ever awarded (Michigan, 1959). His 1975 book Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems introduced the genetic algorithm, a population-based search method that evolves candidate solutions through selection, crossover and mutation.

Holland's schema theorem gave a mathematical analysis of how genetic algorithms exploit short, low-order, above-average building blocks of the search space. With colleagues at Michigan and the Santa Fe Institute he developed classifier systems (rule-based learning systems trained by genetic algorithms with a credit-assignment "bucket brigade") and shaped the field of complex adaptive systems. His later books Hidden Order (1995) and Emergence (1998) brought these ideas to a broader scientific and educated-lay audience.