Overview

This page includes the sources of a comprehensive set of presentation slides (850 slides for 24 lectures, with 1155 images and 156 animations/demos) that can be used as a starting point for developing your own class. They are available under the CC BY 4.0: Creative Commons Attribution license that allows general reuse and adaptation with attribution (it is the same as the most permissive license in arXiv).

The slides are part of a comprehensive set of materials for a class that was developed in Fall 2024 at the University of Texas at Austin. The syllabus, reading materials, assignments, 4-up printout of the slides, and video recordings of the lectures are available at https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~risto/cs378ne. The site is a snapshot of that class, however, the reading assignments have been updated to point to the final text of the book, and the slides have been updated to include a few new topics, and image credits.

Using the slides

The slides are provided as view-only projects in Overleaf (except one lecture in Powerpoint). Overleaf makes it easy to share them and update them collaboratively. There’s a separate project for each chapter, covering one or two lectures. As soon as you go to the project, Overleaf compiles it to a current pdf that you can download and use as is. Or if you just want to see what the slides look like, you can get them (in the 4-up format) from the class website (separately for each lecture) without having to go to Overleaf.

To make edits, make a copy of the project in your own Overleaf account—you can then edit it any way you want. The pdf can be used as a presentation in Acroread or another pdf reader. However, in the same directory where you have the pdf, you also need to have a subdirectory “movies” with all the animations in it. Simply download the “movies” folder from Overleaf to it.

(Note: the movie botprize.mov in 6 is too large to be included in Overleaf; it needs to be copied from the class website or book demo page into the “movies” directory).

The animations are included with the “movie” macro in the source, and identified in the slides with the “Embedded demo” on top of the image. Just click on the image to play it. In addition to the embedded demos, there are often links to demos on the web; they are identified at the bottom of the slide with “Demo link: URL” where the URL is clickable and opens in a browser. The animations and demos are also accessible from the class website for each lecture.

If the embedded demos do not play, the problem is most likely in the Acroread security settings. First, go to Preferences -> Multimedia Trust (Legacy) and check the box for “Allow multimedia operations”. If that doesn’t help, go to Preferences -> Security (Enhanced) and uncheck “Enable Protected Mode at Startup”. If that doesn’t work, uncheck “Enable Enhanced Security”. Those should solve it; if not, Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude may make other suggestions.

Coverage

The slides cover the book quite well, although a few sections had to be left out because there was not enough time to present them, they were too detailed for a lecture, or were added to the book after the slides were already made. There’s a comment on top of the Overleaf source that gives more details. They are: 2.2.4-2.2.7, 4.3.6, 5.4.4, 7.3, 9.2.3, 12.4, 13.3.4, 13.4. In addition, slides do exist for 12.3.3, 13.2.3, and 13.5 but they weren’t presented for the same reasons.

In general, lectures for Chapters 12 Reinforcement Learning and 13 Generative AI should be split into two—there’s enough material already, and more could be added for the currently missing sections (12.4, 13.3.4, 13.4). However, it would require replacing some of the review sessions, and there are already a lot of topics. It would be better to take the time away from somewhere else, depending on your preferences. Also, there’s currently only one lecture for Chapter 7 Neuroevolution of Collective Systems. If slides are added for Section 7.3 Cellular Automata, it would expand to two lectures.

Technical details

While Overleaf is great for collaborative work, and latex in general makes papers look great, it is more technical and less convenient than e.g. Powerpoint for creating slides. There are a few advantages: it gives you a consistent design across the slides, and structures can be easily copied and modified across the slides. But sometimes you do need to do some latex hacking to get things to work right. Look for examples in existing slides; it is easy to copy and tweak them until they work.

The nemacros.sty that’s included in every project defines a few macros that makes it easy to include figures consistently, with credits, labels (i.e. captions), and animations. The parameters give some flexibility with spacing. By default, image credit is above the label and in smaller font; this design doesn’t always work and can be swapped (with font size adjusted in the parameter field). The macros are still convenient if credit or label is missing; argument “~” can be used then. Sometimes one credit line applies to multiple figures; a separate  “\tiny{credit}” can be used then. Actual figure captions are used especially in the earlier lectures. They could be consistently replaced with the macros.

For consistency, image credits are in parentheses and in tiny font. In contrast, labels/captions and active links (i.e. demos) do not have parentheses and they are in footnotesize font. Sometimes the credits point to a url, but the formatting makes it clear they are credits, not links. The label field in the macro is used for links, and they are set with “\url”. The credits are simply citations, as in a paper. If they aren’t obvious (e.g. included in the references section of the book), there should be an actual URL in the source (there should probably be more of those URLs included).

Some slides include screenshots from ppt talks. It saved time at the time but the image credits were really hard to place right later (with “\vspace” and “\hspace”). In hindsight it would have been faster to just redo those figures in latex source.

If the compilation results in an error, the reason is often misbalanced curly brackets “{}”. Even if the error message doesn’t give you where, the source usually indicates them (with a triangle on the left) so they are easy to find.

Updates and Contributions

The slides are likely to be updated occasionally as we present them more and new topics come out. If you create your own set of slides, or add animations or demos, we’d be happy to point to those or host them on the neuroevolutionbook.com site. We can also discuss requests and contributions at discussion forum (under the Community tab on the book website) or at the Neuroevolution Community Github site.