Abstract
We investigate genetic algorithms where more than two parents are involved in the recombination operation. We introduce two multi-parent recombination mechanisms: gene scanning and diagonal crossover that generalize uniform, respecively n-point crossovers. In this paper we concentrate on the gene scanning mechanism and we perform extensive tests to observe the effect of different numbers of parents on the performance of the GA. We consider different problem types, such as numerical optimization, constrained optimization (TSP) and constraint satisfaction (graph coloring). The experiments show that 2-parent recombination is inferior on the classical DeJong functions. For the other problems the results are not conclusive, in some cases 2 parents are optimal, while in some others more parents are better.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Eiben, A.E., Raué, P.E., Ruttkay, Z. (1994). Genetic algorithms with multi-parent recombination. In: Davidor, Y., Schwefel, HP., Männer, R. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature — PPSN III. PPSN 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 866. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58484-6_252
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58484-6_252
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