Orgy in the computer: multi-parent reproduction in genetic algorithms
Á. E. Eiben, C.H.M. vanKemenade, Jonathan Kok · 1995
. In this paper we investigate the phenomenon of multi-parent reproduction, i.e. we study recombination mechanisms where an arbitrary n ? 1 number of parents participate in creating children. In particular, we discuss scanning crossover that generalizes the standard uniform crossover and diagonal crossover that generalizes 1-point crossover, and study the effects of different number of parents on the GA behavior. We conduct experiments on tough function optimization problems and observe that by multi-parent operators the performance of GAs can be enhanced significantly. We also give a theoretical foundation by showing how these operators work on distributions. 1 Introduction Natural and artificial recombination mechanisms (applied in Evolutionary Computation) are rather different. However, they all agree on the number of parents: it is either 1 or 2. As for natural reproduction, the absence of multi-parent reproduction can be understood if we consider the practical difficulties. For ...