Re: [ANNOUNCE 0/4][RFC] Genetic Algorithm Library

[Jake Moilanen <moilanen@austin.ibm.com>]

On Sat, 08 Jan 2005 09:19:42 -0500
James Bruce <bruce@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

> Ok I've read the patch and see you do indeed have crossover; Now I have 
> a different question.  What is the motivation for generating two 
> children at once, instead of just one?    Genes values shouldn't get 
> "lost" since the parents are being kept around anyway.  Also, since the 
> parameters in general will not have a meaningful ordering, it might make 
> sense for the generic crossover to be the "each gene randomly picked 
> from one of the two parents" approach.  In practice  I've found that to 
> mix things up a bit better in the parameter optimization problems I've 
> done with GAs.

The intitial motivation for creating two children at once was so each
parent could pass on all of their genes.  The 75% of the parent's genes
might be in child A, but the other 25% would be in child B.  

Thinking about it more, there should be no reason that all of a parent's
genes have to be passed on in a child.  It would not be too difficult to
have each gene come randomly from one of the two parents.  I'll add that
in on the next rev of the patches. 

Thanks,
Jake