The efficiency threshold for the offspring population size of the ( µ, λ ) EA
Denis Antipov, Benjamin Doerr, Quentin Yang · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference · 2019
Understanding when evolutionary algorithms are efficient or not, and how they efficiently solve problems, is one of the central research tasks in evolutionary computation. In this work, we make progress in understanding the interplay between parent and offspring population size of the (µ, λ) EA. Previous works, roughly speaking, indicate that for λ ≥ (1 + ε)eµ, this EA easily optimizes the OneMax function, whereas an offspring population size λ ≤ (1 - ε)eµ leads to an exponential runtime.