Extended Selection Mechanisms in Genetic Algorithms.
Thomas Bäck, Frank Hoffmeister · 1991
Common selection mechanisms used in Evolutionary Algorithms are combined to form some generalized variants of selection. These are applied to a Genetic Algorithm and are subject to an experimental comparison. The feature of extinctiveness as introduced in Evolution Strategies is identified to be the main reason for a considerable speedup of the search in case of unimodal objective functions. 1 Introduction Genetic Algorithms (GAs) [Hol75] and Evolution Strategies (ESs) [Rec73, Sch81] are two types of algorithms which try to imitate the mechanism of natural evolution. In this paper the generic term Evolutionary Algorithms is used to denote such algorithms with the common features of a population of individuals which undergo Darwinian selection of the fitter individuals and which are subject to mutation and sexual recombination processes [BH91, HB91]. The selection mechanism of such algorithms plays an important role for driving the search towards better individuals on the one hand an...