The Colloquium Series of the Department of Computer Science, University of Wyoming presents Robert Heckendorn Ph. Genetic Algorithms have proved useful in providing solutions in an industrial setting for a variety of very difficult problems such as jet engine design, factory floor scheduling, VLSI layout, and production parameter selection.
GAs are easy to implement and often robust in solving problems with large search spaces.
These problems provide an opportunity to learn more about the inner workings of GAs and what makes problems hard for them. In this talk, I will present several of the simple yet difficult problems that our research group has been studying and discuss where the difficulties arise. In the process, I will touch on what we mean by difficulty and discuss some of the general terminology used in the field of evolutionary computation. I will show how epistasis and partition conflict make problems difficult and how we use Walsh Analysis to examine the epistasis of a problem.