What is a genetic algorithm?
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Methods of representation Methods of selection Methods of change
Other problem-solving techniques
Concisely stated, a genetic algorithm (or GA for short) is a programming technique that mimics biological evolution as a problem-solving strategy. Given a specific problem to solve, the input to the GA is a set of potential solutions to that problem, encoded in some fashion, and a metric called a fitness function that allows each candidate to be quantitatively evaluated. These candidates may be solutions already known to work, with the aim of the GA being to improve them, but more often they are generated at random.
The GA then evaluates each candidate according to the fitness function. In a pool of randomly generated candidates, of course, most will not work at all, and these will be deleted. However, purely by chance, a few may hold promise - they may show activity, even if only weak and imperfect activity, toward solving the problem.
These promising candidates are kept and allowed to reproduce. Multiple copies are made of them, but the copies are not perfect; random changes are introduced during the copying process. These digital offspring then go on to the next generation, forming a new pool of candidate solutions, and are subjected to a second round of fitness evaluation. Those candidate solutions which were worsened, or made no better, by the changes to their code are again deleted; but again, purely by chance, the random variations introduced into the population may have improved some individuals, making them into better, more complete or more efficient solutions to the problem at hand. Again these winning individuals are selected and copied over into the next generation with random changes, and the process repeats. The expectation is that the average fitness of the population will increase each round, and so by repeating this process for hundreds or thousands of rounds, very good solutions to the problem can be discovered.
As astonishing and counterintuitive as it may seem to some, genetic algorithms have proven to be an enormously powerful and successful problem-solving strategy, dramatically demonstrating
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the power of evolutionary principles. Genetic algorithms have been used in a wide variety of fields to evolve solutions to problems as difficult as or more difficult than those faced by human designers. Moreover, the solutions they come up with are often more efficient, more elegant, or more complex than anything comparable a human engineer would produce. In some cases, genetic algorithms have come up with solutions that baffle the programmers who wrote the algorithms in the first place! Methods of representation
Before a genetic algorithm can be put to work on any problem, a method is needed to encode potential solutions to that problem in a form that a computer can process. One common approach is to encode solutions as binary strings: sequences of 1's and 0's, where the digit at each position represents the value of some aspect of the solution. Another, similar approach is to encode solutions as arrays of integers or decimal numbers, with each position again representing some particular aspect of the solution. This approach allows for greater precision and complexity than the comparatively restricted method of using binary numbers only and often \problem space\
This technique was used, for example, in the work of Steffen Schulze-Kremer, who wrote a genetic algorithm to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein based on the sequence of amino acids that go into it (Mitchell 1996, p. 62).
Schulze-Kremer's GA used real-valued numbers to represent the so-called \angles\between the peptide bonds that connect amino acids. (A protein is made up of a sequence of basic building blocks called amino acids, which are joined together like the links in a chain. Once all the amino acids are linked, the protein folds up into a complex three-dimensional shape based on which amino acids attract each other and which ones repel each other. The shape of a protein determines its function.) Genetic
algorithms for training neural networks often use this method of encoding also.
A third approach is to represent individuals in a GA as strings of letters, where each letter again stands for a specific aspect of the solution. One example of this technique is Hiroaki Kitano's \the task of evolving a simple set of rules called a context-free
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grammar that was in turn used to generate neural networks for a variety of problems (Mitchell 1996, p. 74).
The virtue of all three of these methods is that they make it easy to define operators that cause the random changes in the selected candidates: flip a 0 to a 1 or vice versa, add or subtract from the value of a number by a randomly chosen amount, or change one letter to another. (See the section on Methods of change for more detail about the genetic operators.) Another strategy, developed principally by John Koza of Stanford University and called genetic programming, represents programs as branching data structures called trees (Koza et al. 2003, p. 35). In this approach, random changes can be brought about by changing the operator or altering the value at a given node in the tree, or replacing one subtree with another.
Figure 1: Three simple program trees of the kind normally used in genetic programming. The mathematical expression that each one
represents is given underneath. It is important to note that evolutionary algorithms do not need to represent candidate solutions as data strings of fixed length. Some do represent them in this way, but others do not; for example, Kitano's grammatical encoding discussed above can be efficiently scaled to create large and complex neural networks, and Koza's genetic programming trees can grow arbitrarily large as necessary to solve whatever problem they are applied to. Methods of selection
There are many different techniques which a genetic algorithm can use to select the individuals to be copied over into the next generation, but listed below are some of the most common methods.
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外文翻译-遗传算法
