Parsimony and Fault Tolerance

Abstract

This chapter investigates how the nature of the evolutionary process itself can be exploited for engineering purposes. In the first section, a phenomenon originally observed in molecular evolution — namely, the evolution of insensitivity to genetic mutations — is explored in the context of engineering GAs. Having seen that the effect is significant, the second section describes how it can be exploited by the engineer to give a tendency for parsimonious solutions, or solutions robust to certain kinds of variation. A particularly important instance of robustness to variations is fault tolerance, and the remainder of the chapter goes on to study other evolutionary mechanisms by which it can be achieved.¹