Synopsis:
This book discusses a class of algorithms which rely on analogies to natural processes - algorithms based on the principle of evolution, i.e., survival of the fittest. In these algorithms, called evolution programs, a population of individuals undergo a sequence of transformations. The individuals strive for survival: a selection scheme biased towards fitter individuals selects the next generation. After some generations, the program converges and the best individual hopefully represents the optimum solution. Hence evolution programming techniques are applicable to various hard optimization problems. The book discusses constrained optimization problems in the areas of optimal control, operations research, and engineering. The problems include optimization of functions with linear constraints, the traveling salesman problem, scheduling and partitioning problems, etc. All methods are illustrated by results obtained from various experimental systems. The book collects, in a unified and comprehensive manner, the results of evolution programming techniques previously available only in widely scattered research papers. The importance of these techniques has been growing in the last decade, since evolution programs are parallel in nature, and parallelism is one of the most promising directions in computer science. The book is self-contained and the only prerequisite is basic undergraduate mathematics. It is aimed at researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in the areas of computer science (especially artificial intelligence), operations research, and engineering.
Review:
Zbigniew Michalewicz's Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution Programs has three sections. The first section is a straightforward introduction to genetic algorithms. In the second section, Michalewicz describes how to apply genetic algorithms to numerical optimization. Michalewicz, who is a pioneer in this field, discusses the rationale for using genetic algorithms for numerical optimization and describes several experiments that show how this new type of genetic algorithm performs. The author devotes the third section of the book to evolution programs.
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