TABLE OF CONTENTS Overall, then, we will view [complex adaptive systems] (CAS) as systems composed of interacting agents described in terms of rules. These agents adapt by changing their rules as experience accumulates. In CAS, a major part of the environment of any given adaptive agent consists of other adaptive agents, so that a portion of any agent s efforts at adaptation is spent adapting to other adaptive agents.
John Holland, Hidden Order [Holl95]
One of EINSTein s most powerful built-in features is a genetic algorithm breeder run-mode. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are a class of heuristic search methods and computational models of adaptation and evolution based on natural selection. In nature, the search for beneficial adaptations to a continually changing environment (i.e., evolution) is fostered by the cumulative evolutionary knowledge that each species possesses of its forebears. This knowledge, which is encoded in the chromosomes of each member of a species, is passed on from one generation to the next by a mating process in which the chromosomes of parents produce offspring chromosomes.
GAs mimic and exploit the genetic dynamics underlying natural evolution to search for optimal solutions of general combinatorial optimization problems. They have been applied to the traveling salesman problem, VLSI circuit layout, gas pipeline control, the parametric design of aircraft, neural net architecture, models of international security, and strategy formulation.
While their modern form is derived mainly from John Holland s work in the 1960s [Holl92a], many key ideas such as using selection of the fittest population-based selection...
