In a redundant genetic encoding, several distinct chromosomes represent each candidate solution to the target problem. Such an encoding would seem to hinder genetic search by allowing competing representations of the same information. Three encodings of the problem's solutions have much, some, and no redundancy. All number the target instance's points and represent sets of 3-cycles as permutations of those numbers. In the most redundant encoding, the first three points a chromosome lists form a cycle, the next three points form another, and so on.
Mutation can swap the symbols in two random positions of the parent chromosome.
It is 1-elitist and runs through a fixed number of generations. Three of the data sets are well known traveling salesman problem instances. The others consist of points randomly placed on a 100 by 100 grid. The number of points used was always a multiple of three. In these tests, the GA's population contained 2 n chromosomes.