Timeline for Is a genetic algorithm needed when computation is infinitely fast?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 3, 2014 at 13:41 | audit | First posts | |||
| Apr 3, 2014 at 13:42 | |||||
| Mar 20, 2014 at 14:35 | comment | added | recursion.ninja | Simulated Annealing is a variation of Genetic Algorithm which addresses the local maxima/minima problem very effectively. | |
| Mar 20, 2014 at 13:26 | comment | added | Cruncher | GA's are generally not used for finding optimal solutions. They're for finding reasonable solutions given some limited amount of time. | |
| Mar 20, 2014 at 12:38 | comment | added | Daniel B | I'd say there's a bit more to it than just this; firstly, while the question presupposes "unlimited computation resources", GAs are typically used where exhaustive search is completely infeasible (we're talking "wait for the universe to end" infeasible here, which you approach rapidly with any interesting problems). Secondly, GAs have a crossover operator, in addition to plain old mutation; for certain types of problems (NFL holding), this is a very good heuristic, and far better than exhaustive search. The rest, I'd largely agree with. | |
| Mar 20, 2014 at 10:44 | comment | added | resgh | @deong In many cases, better states, or even optimum states, may be rejected occasionally (e.g. non-deterministic systems), so it may be necessary to search cases repeatedly. | |
| Mar 20, 2014 at 9:15 | comment | added | deong | Doesn't this entropy question basically boil down to "GAs often repeat states and brute force never does"? The way I tend to think about it as that a search algorithm defines and is defined by a permutation over the solution space. In short, a search algorithm is nothing more than the order in which it visits the points (modulo some overhead due to repeated evalutions). The NFL theorems make perfect sense then -- I can always construct a problem for which my algorithm will encounter the optimum sooner than yours and vice versa. | |
| Mar 20, 2014 at 8:51 | history | edited | sea-rob | CC BY-SA 3.0 | deleted 13 characters in body |
| Mar 20, 2014 at 8:08 | history | edited | sea-rob | CC BY-SA 3.0 | added 614 characters in body |
| Mar 20, 2014 at 8:01 | history | answered | sea-rob | CC BY-SA 3.0 |