A Study in Set Recombination
Nicholas J. Radcliffe, Felicity George · 1993
A family of problems for which the solution is a fixed size set is studied, using fitness functions with varying degrees of epistasis. An empirical comparison between a traditional crossover operator with a binary representation and a penalty function, and the representationindependent Random Assorting Recombination Operator (RAR) is performed. RAR is found to perform marginally better in all cases. Since RAR is a parameterised operator, a study of the effect of varying its parameter, which can control any trade-off between respect and assortment, is also presented. 1 Introduction Throughoutthe short history of genetic algorithms there has been a creative tension between two quite distinct schools of thought on the subjects of representations and operators. The fundamental disagreement concerns the relative merits of simple, low cardinality representations used with standard recombination operators---typically "n-point" and more recently uniform crossover 1 ---and more complex, prob...