Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

Blogger and regular reader Nosophorus asks the following:

…I only know that those Competent GAs “refer to principled procedures that solve a large category of hard problems quickly, reliably, and accurately”. However, there is some canonical form for those GAs ?? There is some paper that reports about those GAs…

I’m glad you asked. Competent GAs take many different forms, but they all share certain characteristics and principles of operation. First, they are population based and they all possess an adaptive or self-adaptive crossfertilizing mechanism that learns and exchanges effective substructures. Second, the use of a population and crossfertilization mandates a certain physics of initialization, competition, decision, and exchange.

Interestingly, since 1993 and the fast messy GA, many different types of mechanisms have been developed for competent GAs, and if you would compare one to the other, you wouldn’t recognize their similarities. For example, outwardly the fast messy GA looks nothing like hBOA. Only at the level of theory of operation do their similarities appear. There are many papers, theses, and dissertations that establish these principles going back to the late 80s and early 90s, but my book The Design of Innovation (see also here) is a one-stop source for surveying the principles and some of the mechanisms of competent GAs. The book provides the basics and you can dig into the different areas of concern at your leisure. A google searchable version of DOI is available here.