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A gestalt genetic algorithm: less details for better search

Published:07 July 2007Publication History

ABSTRACT

The basic idea to defend in this paper is that an adequate perception of the search space, sacrificing most of the precision, can paradoxically accelerate the discovery of the most promising solution zones. While any search space can be observed at any scale according to the level of details, there is nothing inherent to the classical metaheuristics to naturally account for this multi-scaling. Nevertheless, the wider the search space the longer the time needed by any metaheuristic to discover and exploit the "promising" zones. Any possibility to compress this time is welcome. Abstracting the search space during the search is one such possibility. For instance, a common Ordering Genetic Algorithm (o-GA) is not well suited to efficiently resolve very large instances of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The mechanism presented here (reminiscent of Gestalt psychology) aims at abstracting the search space by substituting the variables of the problems with macro-versions of them. This substitution allows any given metaheuristic to tackle the problem at various scales or through different multi-resolution lenses. In the TSP problem to be treated here, the towns will simply be aggregated into regions and the metaheuristics will apply on this new one-level-up search space. The whole problem becomes now how to discover the most appropriate regions and to merge this discovery with the running of the o-GA at the new level.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      GECCO '07: Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
      July 2007
      2313 pages
      ISBN:9781595936974
      DOI:10.1145/1276958

      Copyright © 2007 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 7 July 2007

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      GECCO '07 Paper Acceptance Rate266of577submissions,46%Overall Acceptance Rate1,669of4,410submissions,38%

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