Genetic Algorithms and Search Space

• If you think of a GA in terms of search space, you are looking for regularities in the space.
• That is, adjacent genes (that are preserved in reproduction) need to encode useful information.
• Mutation allows you to jump around.
• In general, if you randomly generated items each generation, eventually you'd search the whole space.
• The regularities that you find help you search faster.
• How big is the search space of genes with 25 elements each having a value between 1 and 25?
• The size of the travelling salesman problem is 2^N. (It's NP-Complete.)