Center of mass encoding: a self-adaptive representation with adjustable redundancy for real-valued parameters

In this paper we describe a new class of representations for realvalued parameters called Center of Mass Encoding (CoME). CoME is based on variable length strings, it is self-adaptive, and it permits the choice of the degree of redundancy of the genotype-tophenotype map and the choice of the distribution of the redundancy over the space of phenotypes. We first describe CoME and then proceed to test its performance and compare it with other representations and with a state-of-the-art evolution strategy. We show that CoME performs well on a large set of test functions. Furthermore, we show how CoME adapts the granularity of its discretization on functions defined over nonuniformly scaled domains. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.8 [Artificial Intelligence]: Problem Solving, Control Methods, and Search General Terms Algorithms, Performance, Experimentation Keywords CoME, center of mass encoding, genetic encoding, genetic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms, redundant representation...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: Genetic and Evolutional Computation Conference, GECCO2007
• Authors: Claudio Mattiussi, Peter Dürr, Dario Floreano
• Keywords: GECCO 2007, Optimization, Parameters Called Center, State-of-the-art Evolution Strategy, Variable Length Strings