COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION AND THE KNAPSACK CIPHER
Andrew Eric Clark, Ed Dawson, Helen A. Bergen · Cryptologia · 1996
Recent suggestions in [8] that optimization techniques such as the genetic algorithm can be used to successfully solve knapsack ciphers are somewhat optimistic. The inability to assign an appropriate fitness to an arbitrary solution of the knapsack cipher is the downfall with this method. In this paper a detailed analysis of the proposed fitness function is undertaken and numerical results are presented displaying the futility of using this fitness function in a genetic algorithm for solving knapsack ciphers of any reasonable size.