Applications of genetic algorithms and neural networks to interatomic potentials

Applications of two modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, genetic algorithms (GA) and neural networks (NN) to computer simulations are reported. It is shown that the GA are very useful tools for determining the minimum energy structures of clusters of atoms described by interatomic potential functions and generally outperform other optimisation methods for this task. A number of applications are given including covalent, and close packed structures of single or multi-component atomic species. It is also shown that (many body) interatomic potential functions for multi-component systems can be derived by training a specially constructed NN on a variety of structural data. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.