Evolutionary Exploration of Search Spaces

. Exploration and exploitation are the two cornerstones of problem solving by search. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are search algorithms that explore the search space by the genetic search operators, while exploitation is done by selection. During the history of EAs different operators have emerged, mimicing asexual and sexual reproduction in Nature. Here we give an overview of the variety of these operators, review results discussing the (dis)advantages of asexual and sexual mechanisms and touch on a new phenomenon: multi-parent reproduction. 1 Introduction Generate-and-test search algorithms obtain their power from two sources: exploration and exploitation. Exploration means the discovery of new regions in the search space, exploitation amounts to using collected information in order to direct further search to promising regions. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are stochastic generate-and-test search algorithms having a number of particular properties. The standard pseudo-code for an..