Tuesday 17 February 2015

Published February 17, 2015 by with 16 comments

The Genetic Algorithm - Explained

Paradigm of Evolution

Every organism contains an array of traits - called DNA, when 2 parents mate they produce a child containing a mixture of their DNA. Depending on how well those traits work together to help the child survive so that he may reproduce, will determine if those traits will pass into future generation. Rarely a random trait enters a child's DNA that was not inherited from the parents, we call this mutation. If the mutation is beneficial, the organism will survive long enough to carry the mutation over to future generations. So the cycle continues, after many generations we continue to optimize the population by "mixing and matching", "trial and error" of  DNA.

Introduction

Genetic Algorithms are used to find optimal solution by method of evolution-inspired search and optimization; Generally used in problems where linear/brute-force searches are not viable in terms of time, such as – Travelling Salesman Problem, Timetable Scheduling, Finding Neural Network Weights, Sudoku, Trees(data-structure) etc..  The first requirement is an encoding scheme suitable for representing individuals, second requirement being a evaluation function for representing the fitness of an individual.

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