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A building-block Royal Road where crossover is provably essential

A building-block Royal Road where crossover is provably essential
A building-block Royal Road where crossover is provably essential
One of the most controversial yet enduring hypotheses about what genetic algorithms (GAs) are good for concerns the idea that GAs process building-blocks. More specifically, it has been suggested that crossover in GAs can assemble short low-order schemata of above average fitness (building blocks) to create higher-order higher-fitness schemata. However, there has been considerable difficulty in demonstrating this rigorously and intuitively. Here we provide a simple building-block function that a GA with two-point crossover can solve on average in polynomial time, whereas an asexual population or mutation hill-climber cannot.
1452-1459
Association for Computing Machinery
Watson, Richard A.
ce199dfc-d5d4-4edf-bd7b-f9e224c96c75
Jansen, Thomas
8a768b02-300d-4ded-94e4-8d94c640ed76
Thierens, Dirk
0f991e11-375d-452b-8613-bbc66a799def
Lipson, Hod
2c878483-b35c-4946-be97-e68430f8db7d
Watson, Richard A.
ce199dfc-d5d4-4edf-bd7b-f9e224c96c75
Jansen, Thomas
8a768b02-300d-4ded-94e4-8d94c640ed76
Thierens, Dirk
0f991e11-375d-452b-8613-bbc66a799def
Lipson, Hod
2c878483-b35c-4946-be97-e68430f8db7d

Watson, Richard A. and Jansen, Thomas (2007) A building-block Royal Road where crossover is provably essential. Thierens, Dirk and Lipson, Hod (eds.) In GECCO '07 Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1452-1459 .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

One of the most controversial yet enduring hypotheses about what genetic algorithms (GAs) are good for concerns the idea that GAs process building-blocks. More specifically, it has been suggested that crossover in GAs can assemble short low-order schemata of above average fitness (building blocks) to create higher-order higher-fitness schemata. However, there has been considerable difficulty in demonstrating this rigorously and intuitively. Here we provide a simple building-block function that a GA with two-point crossover can solve on average in polynomial time, whereas an asexual population or mutation hill-climber cannot.

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Published date: July 2007
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 264283
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/264283
PURE UUID: e69690c3-c460-482a-866c-cb4a32ea39c3
ORCID for Richard A. Watson: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2521-8255

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 07 Jul 2007
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 03:42

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Contributors

Author: Richard A. Watson ORCID iD
Author: Thomas Jansen
Editor: Dirk Thierens
Editor: Hod Lipson

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