Analyzing search heuristics with differential equations
Tobias Friedrich, Timo Kötzing, Anna Melnichenko · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2017
Drift Theory is currently the most common technique for the analysis of randomized search heuristics because of its broad applicability and the resulting tight first hitting time bounds. The biggest problem when applying a drift theorem is to find a suitable potential function which maps a complex space into a single number, capturing the essence of the state of the search in just one value.