A building-block Royal Road where crossover is provably essential

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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