CS 5970 Homework 3 — Evolutionary Computation for Problem Solving

1. Motivation

To use evolutionary computation to solve problems, we need to apply them to particular problems. To do that, we need to (following De Jong, Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach, p 72):

• decide what an individual in the population represents,
• provide a means for computing the fitness of an individual,
• decide how children (new search points) are generated from parents (current search points),
• specify population sizes and dynamics,
• define termination criteria for stopping the evolutionary process, and
• return an answer

2. Goals

The goals of this assignment are:

• to give you experience with reading papers from the primary, peer-reviewed literature in evolutionary computation, and
• to give you experience with dissecting such papers and understanding how evolutionary computation models are implemented for particular problems.

3. Assignment

Read the paper "Using Action Abstraction to Evolve Effective Controllers" by Eskridge and Hougen (this is a draft of the paper by this name that we published in the proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in 2009) then answer the questions below regarding the EC system in this paper.

1. What does an individual in the population represent?
2. Is this a fixed-length linear object, a fixed-length nonlinear object, a variable-length linear object, or a nonlinear variable-length object?
3. How is each individual encoded?
4. Is this encoding genotypical or phenotypical?
5. How is fitness calculated for each individual in the population?
6. What reproductive operators are used?
7. What parameters are used for each of the reproductive operators?
8. What is the parent population size?
9. What is the offspring population size?
10. Is an overlapping or non-overlapping generation model used?
11. What stopping criteria are used?
12. What answers are returned?

4. What to Turn In

You will turn in to the appropriate dropbox in D2L a machine readable electronic copy of your homework that answers the questions above.