Re: [cilib-devel] Mutation and additional parameters in Individuals

[Andries E. <en...@cs...>]

Hi,

> 1. Where should the definition of the initialization for these extra parameters 
> be placed? On the individual? In the EC algorithm? Within the 
> IterationStrategy?
>   

You refer to the Strategy parameters here. What we have to remember
is that strategy parameters can be "global" or "local". What I mean by
this is that the same parameter can be used for all individuals, or each
individual can have its own parameter. The latter can have an even
smaller granularity in that each dimension of each individual can have
its own strategy parameter. We should also think about cultural
algorithms where there is a bielief space, which have some relation
to strategy parameters. The solution should take the latter into account.

We may argue that not all EAs have strategy parameters, e.g. GA.
However, in our implementation, parameters such as crossover and
mutation probability can be seen as strategy parameters with no
adaptation.

So the question is where does strategy parameters belong? My
feeling is that these should belong to Algorithms. Not just EC
algorithms, but all algorithms. Remember that PSO and others
also have "strategy parameters". performIteration will then have
a call to some strategy to "adapt" the parameters. And this
basically should replace ControlParameters.
> 2. How should mutation be handled? Should the strategies know to inspect the 
> individual for strategy parameters? Should the mutation rather be done in a 
> separate class?
>   
Remember that mutation can be applied in PSO and others. Mutation
is a separate process, that may, or may not make use of the
strategy parameters. So, mutation should be a separate class.

This then also tells me that the strategy parameters should be on
a higher level than on entity level.

> Regards,
> Gary
>
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-- 
==========================================================
Prof Andries P Engelbrecht
South African Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence

Fundamentals of Computational Swarm Intelligence,
John Wiley & Sons, December 2005.

Computational Intelligence, An Introduction
John Wiley & Sons, Second edition to be published soon

Computational Intelligence Research Group:
        http://cirg.cs.up.ac.za

Department of Computer Science
School of Information Technology
University of Pretoria
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