Most applications in analytical chemistry involve the optimization of real numbers. The following menu will then appear. Chromosome Length is the number of genes present on the chromosome. The default settings is a length of 10. The chromosome length is an important consideration when optimizing a real variable problem.
Longer chromosomes allow better conversion from the binary chromosome to the real number variable.
However, the longer chromosome is computationally more inefficient and generally takes longer to find the optimal region. This concept can be studied by changing the fitness function to the bohachevsky function. Population Size is the number of chromosomes in the population. Larger population sizes increase the amount of variation present in the population at the expense of requiring more fitness function evaluations. I have found that the best population size is dependent upon both the application and the length of the chromosome.