Paper outline:

1. Abstract (1 or at most 2 paragraphs) Abstracts are meant to interest the reader and draw him/her into reading the paper.

   • A summary of the paper.

   • Designed for someone in the field. That is, they (the readers) know about genetic algorithms and the application area.

   • Never use abbreviations in the abstract

     1. Problem

     2. Method of attack

     3. Are the Results promising?

2. Introduction (a few paragraphs). Someone is interested in your work because they read the abstract. Now, provide :

   1. Motivation

      • What is the problem and why is it interesting (application areas)

      • Have other people found it interesting?

      • Why use GAs on your problem?

   2. Background

      • Who has done work in this area before.

      • Goldberg and Holland must be cited in all GA papers.

   3. Short description of Methodology: Your audience is some one in CS who may not know much about GAs or your application area.

      • a paragraph on GAs

      • a paragraph on application
      area is appropriate

   4. Summarize your results. Don't say how you got these results, just what they were

   5. Outline or structure of the rest of the paper.

   The idea is to get the reader to ask how did you get the results you got? To find out they better read the rest of the paper, or, if they are more familiar with the topic to go to the appropriate section.

3. Methodology: For someone who may not know much about GAs or problem area. Flesh out the material in the introduction. Methodology may require more than one section, usually for representation or encoding.

   1. What is a GA? The algorithm, the theory.

   2. What is your problem and how do you use a GA on your particular problem?

   3. Representation, operators, heuristics

4. Results and Analysis (may be two sections)

   • What did you do?

   • Why?

   • and was the outcome what you expected?

   • Why or why not.

   This section usually has a lot of figures and tables.

   • The format is usually: For each Idea I had

     • The neat idea i had of applying GAs to my problem led me to do expect X.

     • When I tried it, here's what happened and why

5. Conclusions and Future Work: Summarize the results and the CONSEQUENCES of your results. Consequences means (among other things) impact on your field.

   • What questions does your work raise?

   • Your suggestions for how to answer those questions OR Conjectures (informed guess as to what the answer is) and some intuition to support your conjectures.

   • Most people in your field will read the abstract results, and this section.

   • Be very careful about what you say. If you say something that does not feel right or is completely wrong you will completely destroy the validity of your entire work.

   • At the same time, if you don't make the right conclusions and raise the right questions, you will once again destroy the validity of the entire body of work you did.

   • this is one of the IMPORTANT sections, don't think that it will be easy. Spend time on it.

6. Bibliography/References: Any style is ok but it must be complete