A comparison of two competitive fitness functions
Liviu Panait, Sean Luke · 2002
Competitive fitness is the assessment of an individual’s fitness in the context of competition with other individuals in the evolutionary system. This commonly takes one of two forms: one-population competitive fitness, where competition is solely between individuals in the same population; and N-population competitive fitness, often termed competitive coevolution. In this paper we discuss common topologies for one-population competitive fitness functions, then test the performance of two such topologies, Single-Elimination Tournament and K-Random Opponents, on four problem domains. We show that neither of the extremes of K-Random Opponents (Round Robin and Random-Pairing) gives the best results when using limited computational resources. We also show that while Single-Elimination Tournament usually outperforms variations of K-Random Opponents in noise-free problems, it can suffer from premature convergence in noisy domains. 1