Related papers: A Tight Runtime Analysis for the $(\mu + \lambda)$…
We analyze the performance of the 2-rate $(1+\lambda)$ Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) with self-adjusting mutation rate control, its 3-rate counterpart, and a $(1+\lambda)$~EA variant using multiplicative update rules on the OneMax problem. We…
Runtime analysis aims at contributing to our understanding of evolutionary algorithms through mathematical analyses of their runtimes. In the context of discrete optimization problems, runtime analysis classically studies the time needed to…
In single-objective optimization, it is well known that evolutionary algorithms also without further adjustments can tolerate a certain amount of noise in the evaluation of the objective function. In contrast, this question is not at all…
We show that, for any c>0, the (1+1) evolutionary algorithm using an arbitrary mutation rate p_n = c/n finds the optimum of a linear objective function over bit strings of length n in expected time Theta(n log n). Previously, this was only…
To gain a better theoretical understanding of how evolutionary algorithms (EAs) cope with plateaus of constant fitness, we propose the $n$-dimensional Plateau$_k$ function as natural benchmark and analyze how different variants of the $(1 +…
The $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm is a recently proposed single-objective evolutionary algorithm with several interesting properties. We show that its main working principle, mutation with a high rate and crossover as repair…
We study evolutionary algorithms in a dynamic setting, where for each generation a different fitness function is chosen, and selection is performed with respect to the current fitness function. Specifically, we consider Dynamic BinVal, in…
While most theoretical run time analyses of discrete randomized search heuristics focused on finite search spaces, we consider the search space $\mathbb{Z}^n$. This is a further generalization of the search space of multi-valued decision…
It is known that the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$~Genetic Algorithm (GA) with self-adjusting parameter choices achieves a linear expected optimization time on OneMax if its hyper-parameters are suitably chosen. However, it is not very well…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs), simulating the evolution process of natural species, are used to solve optimization problems. Crossover (also called recombination), originated from simulating the chromosome exchange phenomena in zoogamy…
Pseudo-Boolean monotone functions are unimodal functions which are trivial to optimize for some hillclimbers, but are challenging for a surprising number of evolutionary algorithms (EAs). A general trend is that EAs are efficient if…
The main goal of diversity optimization is to find a diverse set of solutions which satisfy some lower bound on their fitness. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are often used for such tasks, since they are naturally designed to optimize…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a kind of nature-inspired general-purpose optimization algorithm, and have shown empirically good performance in solving various real-word optimization problems. During the past two decades, promising…
In this paper we revisit the question how hard it can be for the $(1+1)$ Evolutionary Algorithm to optimize monotone pseudo-Boolean functions. By introducing a more pessimistic stochastic process, the partially-ordered evolutionary…
The running-time analysis of evolutionary combinatorial optimization is a fundamental topic in evolutionary computation. Its current research mainly focuses on specific algorithms for simplified problems due to the challenge posed by…
The $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm is one of the few algorithms for which a super-constant speed-up through the use of crossover could be proven. So far, this algorithm has been used with parameters based also on intuitive…
We give a detailed analysis of the cost used by the (1+1)-evolutionary algorithm. The problem has been approached in the evolutionary algorithm literature under various views, formulation and degree of rigor. Our asymptotic approximations…
Choosing the right selection rate is a long standing issue in evolutionary computation. In the continuous unconstrained case, we prove mathematically that a single parent $\mu=1$ leads to a sub-optimal simple regret in the case of the…
We use an elementary argument building on group actions to prove that the selection-free steady state genetic algorithm analyzed by Sutton and Witt (GECCO 2019) takes an expected number of $\Omega(2^n / \sqrt n)$ iterations to find any…
The Makespan Scheduling problem is an extensively studied NP-hard problem, and its simplest version looks for an allocation approach for a set of jobs with deterministic processing times to two identical machines such that the makespan is…