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A building-block royal road where crossover is provably essential

Published: 07 July 2007 Publication History

Abstract

One of the most controversial yet enduring hypotheses about what genetic algorithms (GAs) are good for concerns the idea that GAs process building-blocks. More specifically, it has been suggested that crossover in GAs can assemble short low-order schemata of above average fitness (building blocks) to create higher-order higher-fitness schemata. However, there has been considerable difficulty in demonstrating this rigorously and intuitively. Here we provide a simple building-block function that a GA with two-point crossover can solve on average in polynomial time, whereas an asexual population or mutation hill-climber cannot.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    GECCO '07: Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
    July 2007
    2313 pages
    ISBN:9781595936974
    DOI:10.1145/1276958
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 July 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. building block hypothesis
    2. crossover
    3. genetic algorithms theory
    4. modularity
    5. mutation
    6. royal roads

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    GECCO '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 266 of 577 submissions, 46%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

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    • (2024)Crossover in Parametric FuzzingProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639160(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
    • (2023)The Influence of Noise on Multi-parent Crossover for an Island Model Genetic AlgorithmACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization10.1145/36306384:2(1-28)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Crossover for Cardinality Constrained OptimizationACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization10.1145/36036293:2(1-32)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2023
    • (2023)First Complexity Results for Evolutionary Knowledge TransferProceedings of the 17th ACM/SIGEVO Conference on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms10.1145/3594805.3607137(140-151)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2023
    • (2023)Problem of Domain/Building Block Preservation in the Evolution of Biological Macromolecules and Evolutionary ComputationIEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics10.1109/TCBB.2022.317590820:2(1345-1362)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
    • (2022)Bandit theory and thompson sampling-guided directed evolution for sequence optimizationProceedings of the 36th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3600270.3603044(38291-38304)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2022
    • (2022)The influence of noise on multi-parent crossover for an island model GAProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3512290.3528854(666-674)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
    • (2022)Simple genetic operators are universal approximators of probability distributions (and other advantages of expressive encodings)Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3512290.3528746(739-748)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
    • (2022)Crossover for cardinality constrained optimizationProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3512290.3528713(1399-1407)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
    • (2022)More effective test case generation with multiple tribes of AIProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings10.1145/3510454.3517066(286-290)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
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