A Story to Explain Genetic Algorithms

If you're interested in the world of "computational intelligence" aka "nature-inspired computation", this book is a good high level survey: <a href="http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/</a><p>(You can also find stuff under the heading of "metaheuristics" -- <a href="http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/metaheuristics/" rel="nofollow">http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/metaheuristics/</a>).<p>GAs are one of four (!) different independently developed strands of thought -- Genetic Algorithms, Genetic Programming, Evolutionary Programming and Evolutionary Strategies. Look out for that when you hit the Googletrons.

<i>&#62; Then our Charles simply had to figure out how Mrs Kipling scored the cakes and he could genetically evolve the best cake!</i><p>"And then a miracle happens." Isn't the fitness function the "key ingredient?" (It's in the source code, but not in the text for a reason.)<p>Still a good explanation of the rest.

Once upon there was another local search algorithm. It was called GA. The end.

Unrelated: this simvla network thing looks like a pale imitation of Svbtle.

I would suggest making the fitness function more complex. I think its a bit confusing to see the optimal result be equal to the fitness function's parameters, and it makes it easier to miss the point.

I've written something [1] related to this if someone is interested.<p>[1] <a href="http://pyevolve.sourceforge.net/wordpress/?p=576" rel="nofollow">http://pyevolve.sourceforge.net/wordpress/?p=576</a>

I don't have much of a knowledge of genetic algorithms so it might be good to explicitly say what part of GA algorithms set them apart from other branches of algorithms.<p>Nice story otherwise.

It's not at all clear from the story why or if having multiple recipes "mate" works better than just using one recipe and fiddling with it.

This is stupid. The whole is not simply a sum of its parts in cake baking and biology.

"After thinking long and hard about the problem at hand our Charles came to the conclusion that he knew two things"<p>Lol... long and hard.

Neat little story, despite the grammar and capitalization. Is it common to use _ as an index variable?<p>Edit: for _ in range(4):